The American people have been and are complacently unfamiliar with Communism’s helpmate, Fabian Socialism. For over fifty years but especially since the middle nineteen-thirties there have been insinuated into high places in our government at Washington men whose collaboration in this socialistic movement has been greatly responsible for breaking down our constitutional form of government and substituting therefor the Socialist idea of centralized government.

Every loyal American should read this book. It is well documented, and proves beyond doubt that those who have wielded such vast influence upon successive Presidents, especially since Franklin Roosevelt, do not have a desire to retain the freedom of the individual and the free enterprise system, but rather seek to establish the very coercion from which our forefathers fled. The reader will be shocked when he comprehends that there are those in high places in government who are dedicated to this Socialist movement. The ultimate objective of the Fabian Socialist movement is no different than the ultimate objective of the Communist movement.

NOTE:
The author here presents the names of many members and cooperators
of the British Fabian Society and the British Labour Government as well as
the names of members and cooperators and/or sponsors of American Fabian-
type socialistic organizations such as the League for Industrial Democracy
(LID); and of organizations which pose as “liberal,” such as Americans for
Democratic Action (ADA). The theme developed in the main body of the
book is illustrated graphically as the lists conclude with the names of many
ADA members who hold high positions in the Johnson Administration, today.
The reader’s attention is called to the use of symbols (*) and (t) used
for example to denote the presence of Fabian Socialists in the British Labour
Government; and to denote members of ADA who are members or cooperators
of the League for Industrial Democracy, and so forth. Thus the tie-ins,
in terms of persons in both “liberal” and Socialist organizations, are shown.
A listing in certain of the following categories, does not of and by itself
convict an individual as a Socialist. However, by an amassing of evidence of
this kind, a persistent pattern appears and a movement convicts itself.
Here the mechanics are unveiled by which Socialism is transmitted from
Great Britain and other countries to the United States. And here, in the
United States, a Socialism is rapidly nearing completion for which
International Communism is the only logical beneficiary. Americans who wish to
change this tragic state of affairs are thus informed of the facts.

APPENDIX I

The following selective historical lists are offered as indicative of two
things: 1) the continuity of the roster and of the Fabian Society; 2) the
steady acquisition to Fabianism of new blood, always well-mixed with the
old.(footnote)
It has become a fascination for the writer to read lists of names. They were
gathered from the “Personal Notes,” the “Women’s Group,” the Kingsway Hall
Lectures, “Nursery,” Meetings of the Society, Election Lists, London
County Council election lists, Fabian Society Executive Committees and
records of attendance thereof. Many names (at least two hundred) which
did not appear at the historical level have become those of old friends. They
testify to the unbroken existence and the steady functioning of the Society.
Many tum up in news items, such as the study of the Institute of Pacific
Relations made by a Senate Committee: Creech-Jones, Noel-Baker, R. H.
Tawney, for example.
Individuals became Fabians by being proposed, sponsored, and elected;
and were required to subscribe to the Basis. If the Basis made them English
Socialists, the Society made them members of the Labour and Socialist
International. MacDonald is not included after 1919; yet the Fabianism in his
attitudes and those of his advisers is patent. Likewise, for all his close
associations, Professor Gilbert Murray has not been listed here. Sir Stafford
Cripps and Ernest Bevin like G. D. H. Cole and Ellen Wilkinson, swung to
the far Left at times; but they are Fabians all-and Margaret Cole has
made the old home in the Society comfortable for them all by enlarging the
porch! John Scurr, a Catholic, belonged; but not John Wheatley. Arnold
Bennett, J. B. Priestley, John Galsworthy are listed, although seldom; Patrick
Braybrooke and St. John Ervine, often. The first three names are associated
with The Clarion which consistently from 1929 to 1931 praised the artistry
of Charles Chaplin and Paul Robeson. Reginald Pugh belonged, but up to
1950, not Arthur (now Sir Arthur) Pugh of Steel and Smelters trades.
A complete list of those who never came back to the Society even in
spirit as Wallas, Wells, and Annie Besant did-while Chesterton, S. G. Hobson
(Pilgrim to the Left), A. Drage (New Age), H. Slesser did not-would
be significant. Although Clement Attlee credits much of Labour’s strength

to Irish Catholic workingmen, the latter are vastly unrepresented in the
Fabian Society.
An estimated proportion of professed intellectuals to all others (also middle
class) seems to be about three in eight. This includes those holding
degrees, Bachelor of Arts (more usually, Bachelor of Science), Master of
Arts, Doctor of Philosophy, and those recording their military rank for
prestige, professors – oddly -many medical doctors. Elsewhere is a list
of Protestant ministers. Fabians often filled the position of Justice of the
Peace, the office on which very much of local civics hinges. In 1945 local
Fabian societies added 2,200 members to the Society. Fabian Society Annual
Report, 1946, said, “Newly elected M.P.’s expected the Fabian Society to …
provide them at short notice with policies, or with material for
speeches.”
Names like those of Ben Tillett, J. H. Thomas, J. R. Clynes, J. Wheatley,
E. Befin, A. Bevan, W. Citrine (now Viscount), John Hodges of the steel
workers, Frank Hodges of the miners, and Frank Smith of the coal miners,
were drawn into the field of gravity of the Society.
Margaret MacDonald, nee Gladstone, died in 1911. She ranked with Mary
MacArthur, Mary Middleton, Mrs. Bruce Glazier, Margaret MacMillan, to
whose labors Socialism in Britain is heavily indebted; although, like Mrs.
Glazier, they were inclined to confuse their Socialism with religion, leaving
the philosophic propositions of Fabianism to Haldane, Joad, Russell, and
Slesser (not to mention Wells and Shaw).
A sampling of names of Fabian Justices of the Peace in the nineteen-twenties
and nineteen-thirties follows:

S. K. Ratcliffe, consistent visitor and reporter
W. Hudson Shaw (Oxonian), who came yearly to lecture in the University;
Extension Courses under auspices of Woodrow Wilson, in Philadelphia. They
published The Citizen, 1895 to 1901. (Shaw, known as “Broughman Villiers”)
R. H. Tawney
Graham Wallas
Barbara Ward, Catholic, but not lecturing under Catholic auspices (Lady
Lindsay)

A typical list of Fabians found in Fabian News and Fabian Society Annual
Report in 1923-24:

These names had long been listed; many through the thick and thin of the
nineteen-twenties. They must have kept up their dues, for Margaret Cole
made a clean slate of the paid up membership in her reorganization.

These names, old and new, of Fabians of the 1942 to 1947 group have taken
on the hue and verve of ZIP and the New Fabian Research Bureau:

Last, but not the least, there follows a list of “empire” and “international”
topics and the names of specially interested Fabians. These were taken from
the Fabian Society Annual Report of 1945-1946, and which covers the
election following the last year of war coalition when “Labour” formed a
“Socialist” Government:

The names marked by asterisks are those of persons also serving on the
Fabian Executive.

An International Farewell Gathering held in October, 1945, was presided
over by P. Noel-Baker and sent greetings to French, Belgian and Italian
“comrades” in letters signed by representatives of twelve countries and
addressed to Daniel Mayer, Louis de Brouckere and Pietro Nenni, leading
Social Democrats. Cf. FSAR, 1945, p. 15. In every Fabian Society Annual

Report, 1929 to 1950, the name of Margaret Cole appears in official, foreign
and domestic connections.

As to the Webbs: Sidney (Lord Passfield) was on the Fabian Executive
as late as 1934. From 1935 to 1939, while A. Emil Davies kept the Society
together and the Fabian News coming out, the Webbs, having held up the
publication of their book on Soviet Russia until after the Election of 1935,
devoted themselves to receiving persons of “liberal” persuasion of every
rank (including Maisky, the Russian Ambassador) and to propagandizing
for Sovietism. They received a direct and negative reply to their rhetorical
question: Soviet Socialism: A New Civilisation? from Pius XI in Divini
Redemptoris.

Re: Fabian-inspired Brain Trust on U.S. Trade Union movement, see Fabian
News, November, 1943. The following names are listed as participating:

Bryn Roberts, British TU Delegate to the United States.
Stanley Ceizyk (member of International Association of Machinists Unions”,
AFL).
Hugh T. Mahoney (member of the U.S. Steel Workers Union, CIO).
Sam Berger (Labor Advisor to U.S. Mission for Economic Affairs).
Ernest Davies, M.P., son of A. E. Davies and disciple of Laski; one time
editor of The Clarion.

The following names are those of Fabians who in the nineteen-forties and
nineteen-fifties contributed to the work of the Society notably enough to be
reported in Fabian News and Fabian Journal, in New Fabian Essays, in
pamphlets, lectures on the Colonial Bureau and the International Bureau.

The following members of the London Fabian Society were selected from
about five hundred cards as representing Fabians who have given conspicuous
service to the Society, judging by the citations in Fabian News, Fabian
Journal and Fabian Society Annual Report.

Co-Options
Under Rule 9 of the Society’s Rules, the Executive Committee has co-opted
the following :five mem,bers: Jeremy Bray, M.P.; John Greve; John Vaizey;
Rex Winsbury; Richard Bone.

Honorary Officers

The Executive Committee elected the following to serve for 1962/1963:
Chairman, Mary Stewart; Vice Chairman, Brian Abel-Smith; Honorary
Secretary, John Parker, M.P.

Mary Stewart, who is Chairman of the East London Juvenile Court and co¥
author of two Fabian pamphlets, has been a member of the committee for
13 years. Brian Abel-Smith has served continuously since 1955, and John
Parker has been Honorary Secretary since 1954. John Diamond, M.P., was
returned unopposed as Honorary Treasurer for the thirteenth time in the
Annual Ballot.

THE LABOUR PARTY GOVERNMENT
AS OF OCTOBER, 1964

This list appeared in the November-December, 1964 issue of Fabian News,
With the following notation:

Defense-Secretary of State: *t Denis Healey
Deputy Secretary of State and Minister of Defense for the Army:
t Frederick Mulley
Mini9ster of Defense for the Royal Navy: t Christopher Mayhew.
Minister of Defense for the Royal Air Force: Lord Shacleton.
Under-Secretary of State for Defense for the Royal Navy:
t J. P. W. Mallalieu.
Under Secretary of State for Defense for the Army: G. W. Reynolds.
Under-Secretary of State for Defense for the Royal Air Force:
t Bruce Millan.

Certain names, long identified with the Fabian Society, were not specifically
noted as members-as, for instance, Lord Gardiner, fonnerly on the Fabian
Executive; or Jennie Lee, widow of Harold Wilson’s fonner chief, Aneurin
Bevan. Similarly, Alice Bacon-not starred on the above list-was named
in Fabian News, September, 1957, as a member of the Leeds local of the
Fabian Society. Under the heading, “The General Election,” the same issue
November-December, 1964 of Fabian News {pp. 2-3} also contained the
following comments, which can be regarded as official:

Cabinet

The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was Chairman of the Society in 1954-55
and for many years a member of the Executive Committee. The Minister of
Housing, Dick Crossman, joint editor of New Fabian Essays, only retired from
the Executive Committee last year after many years service. Lord Gardiner,
Patrick Gordon Walker, James Griffiths, Douglas Houghton, Lord Longford and
Michael Stewart are all former members of the Executive Committee. Denis
Healey was chairman of the International Bureau, Arthur Bottomley sat on the
Commonwealth Subcommittee, James Callaghan on the Home Research Committee,
and Barbara Castle, the Minister for Overseas Development, has been
actively associated with the Society’s Commonwealth research.

Other Ministers

Outside the cabinet, Roy Jenkins, the Minister for Aviation, was Chairman of
the Society 1957-1958. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the Postmaster-General, is the
Society’s new Vice Chairman and is Chainnan of the International and Common¥
wealth Bureau, Anthony Crosland the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, was
Chairman in 1961-62. Other active Fabians are George Thomson, Chairman of
Venture Editorial Board, who has now become Minister of State at the Foreign
Office, and Christopher Mayhew, who is an ex-employee.

Junior Appointments

Nearly half the remaining more junior appointments have also gone to members
of the Society. Among them, Eirene White, Chairman 1958-59, becomes
Parliamentary Secretary at the Colonial Office; H. J. Boyden, one of the hardest
working members of the Executive and Vice-Chairman of Local Societies Committee,
becomes Joint Parliamentary Secretary of State for Education and Science.
Dick Mitchison, who recently went to the House of Lords, becomes Parliamentary
Secretary, Ministry of Land and Natural Resources. He was Treasurer of the New
Fabian Research Bureau for six years. John Mackie and Lord Walston, who
once wrote a Fabian pamphlet on agriculture together, receive appointments in
the Ministry of Agriculture and the Foreign Office respectively.

Fabians will have been particularly pleased to hear about the appointments of
Bill Rodgers, John Diamond and Arthur Skeffington, who have been so long
associated with the work of the Society as General Secretary, Honorary Treasurer,
and Chairman of the Local Societies Committee respectively. Bill Rodgers and
another Fabian, Maurice Foley, become Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretaries
in the Department of Economic Affairs. John Diamond becomes Chief Secretary
at the Treasury, and Arthur Skeffington becomes Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry
of Land and Natural Resources. Richard Marsh, who joined the Executive Committee
last year, becomes a Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Labour.

The following boxed item in the same historic issue of Fabian News may
also be pertinent:

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

The Executive Committee, at its meeting on November 3rd, received with
regret the resignations from the Committee of Thomas Balogh and Robert Neild,
consequent upon their appointments as Economic Advisers to the Cabinet Office
and the Treasury respectively.

Thomas Balogh also resigned his position as Vice-Chairman of the Society.
Anthony Wedgwood Benn was appointed Vice-Chairman to succeed him.

Defence-Secretary of State: *t Denis Healey.
Minister of Defence for the Army- Gerry Reynolds.
Minister of Defence for the Royal Navy- t J. P. W. Mallalieu.
Minister of Defence for the Royal Air Force- Lord Shackleton.
Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Navy- t Lord Winter-bottom.
Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Army- t David Ennals.
Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Air Force- t Merlyn Rees.

PARTIAL RECORD OF PAST AND PRESENT “COOPERATORS,”
AS LISTED BY THE [AMERICAN] LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL
DEMOCRACY ON THE OCCASION OF ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY#
(This list appeared in the Congressional Record of October 12, 1962,
originally prepared by Mina Weisenberg for the 50th Anniversary of the LID)

COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE, AMERICANS FOR
DEMOCRATIC ACTION, AS OF JANUARY 9, 1947

From Hearings before the House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities,
81st Congress., Second Session. Americans for Democratic Action. July 11,
12, 1950 (Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950).

Weaver, George L. P.
International Labor Affairs-Department of Labor
Weaver, Robert C.
Housing and Home Finance Agency
Williams, G. Mennen
Department of State
Wofford, Harrison
Special Assistant to the President
Woolner, Sidney
Housing and Home Finance Agency
* Associated with Independent Voters of Illinois, an ADA affiliate.

Sweet are the uses and perquisites of political office, even for those who declare their sole aim is to free humanity from its age-old burden of misery. In America, Hubert Humphrey, whose heart bleeds publicly for the poor of all nations, finds a $750,000 tax free mansion ordered for his vice presidential comfort by an ADA-controlled majority in the Congress. In Britain, Harold Wilson coolly invites the leaders of Socialist parties from fourteen countries, many like himself already holding top government posts, to meet at Chequers, traditional country home of British prime ministers.

With unintentional humor British newspapers hailed that event as a diplomatic coup—as if Harold Wilson, sometimes accompanied by Hubert Humphrey, had not been meeting on the Continent with the same Socialist leaders for years. Recognizing the revolutionary import of the new locale, Socialist International Information for May, 1965 headlined the conference “Socialist Summit at Chequers.” Even the usually conservative Times of London commented in a leading article on April 26,1965, “If Western Europe is to be led by Socialists, that may prove to have been a very useful beginning.”

As international Socialism, open or disguised, moves steadily into positions of power, its chief spokesmen and political agents present an increasingly bland front to the world. This phenomenon was noted by Zigmunt Zaremba, chairman-in-exile of the Socialist Union of Eastern Europe and a Socialist member of the Polish Parliament before World War II. Attending the Eighth Congress of the Socialist International at Amsterdam in 1963, he reported that “eminent party leaders, one after another, came to the rostrum to express, most cautiously, their parties’ attitude toward important political questions, carefully skirting those questions which were ‘premature.'”

“The Congress,” wrote Zaremba in an article reprinted in the U.S. Socialist quarterly, New Politics (Winter, 1964), “was clearly a gathering of those who held high office in their countries and those who hoped to do so shortly.” (1) And he went on to say:

“Only those questions on which there was already a consensus were brought to the floor for discussion and decision. These included disarmament and aid to the underdeveloped countries. Minor resolutions on France, Spain Russian anti-Semitism, racism and civil rights struggles in the USA, and imprisonment of Socialist leaders by Communist-bloc countries were passed unanimously.

“But behind the facade a whole series of questions was heatedly discussed. From the platform, only Guy Mollet [chairman of the French Socialist Party] touched on the question of the relationship of socialist and Communist movements in the present period. Behind the scenes, however, this question was the central issue of the discussions of the Central European Study Group and the Socialist Union of Eastern Europe.”

For Socialist leaders, using the machinery of universal suffrage to gain and hold political power, special caution appears to be indicated as they round the bend heading toward an international federation of Socialist states. Because deep-rooted sentiments of patriotism, national honor and personal independence still animate a great many voters in a great many countries, every effort must be made by international Socialists to obscure the fact that the political and economic bases for such sentiments are being obliterated as rapidly as possible.

Just as a majority of citizens in the later Roman Empire never realized the Empire had fallen, because the outward forms of imperial government persisted several centuries longer; so the peoples of the so-called Free World are not to be made aware that their world is becoming progressively less free. “Socialism is about equality and freedom,” insists Peter Townsend, chairman of the Fabian Society for 1965-66. (2) But George Bernard Shaw knew better. He knew the role that coercion must play in any Socialist scheme of things, and perhaps Peter Townsend does, too.

Meanwhile, whole populations are being conditioned to regard Socialist norms as normal, in preparation for a day when the leaders may more openly reveal their hands. Practical acceptance of many Socialist programs has been obtained, for the most part, by making shrewdly calculated appeals to the immediate interests of key groups and individuals, appeals which are invariably swathed in high humanitarian phrases. By now this technique has reached a point at which as one cynic observed, humanitarianism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Particularly in England and the United States where the public is indifferent to ideology, the psychological approach is used, as was suggested long ago by the British Fabian, Graham Wallas, in his book The Great Society. Developed in depth over the years by Fabian-inspired researchers, that method has been graded and refined with a view to reaching every level of modern society—labor, business, the professions, the bureaucracy, senior citizens, career-minded youth, even pre-school children. It calls for the permeation of colleges, universities, and religious seminaries by Fabian Socialist-oriented educators and administrators, as well as the introduction of uniform “standards” and “guidelines” into federally financed educational systems. For total effect, it requires total control of communications and entertainment media, a state of affairs already in being, if not in full force.

The professor is still the main channel through which the Fabian Socialist outlook percolates to society at large. As the venerable Walter Lippmann said, in a keynote speech opening “The University in America” Convocation at Los Angeles in May, 1966: “Professors have become in the modem world the best available source of guidance and authority in the field of knowledge . . . There is no other court to which men can turn and find what they once found in tradition and custom. Because modern man in his search for truth has turned away from kings, priests, commissars and bureaucrats, he is left, for better or worse, with the professor.” (3) The gathering which Lippmann addressed that night included some 1,500 persons, among them presidents, deans and faculty members as well as bright students of the leading American universities. It was sponsored and steered by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions—offshoot of an offshoot of the Ford Foundation whose president was Professor McGeorge Bundy, former instructor and guide of American Presidents.

So the long-range plan, artlessly set in motion by a little group of serious thinkers meeting at 17 Osnaburgh Street, London, more than eighty years before and patiently pursued by three generations of respectable Fabian Socialists, moved smoothly toward its destined conclusion. With the clear-cut victory of the Fabian-led Labour Party in the 1966 British elections and the repeated success of the Johnson-Humphrey Administration in pushing one welfare state measure after another through the United States Congress, official cooperation between the two major English-speaking nations for the advancement of Socialism promised to reach new heights. The irony of it was, that as the de facto policies and actions of the heads of state leaned more and more strongly to the Left, their personal reputation for moderation soared.

Although Prime Minister Wilson’s new government contained an even larger percentage of identifiable Fabians than before, (4) he was nearly always described in the general press as a right wing Socialist —really, hardly radical at all. Those hard-core Fabian Socialists who filled the Cabinet and the junior Ministries to the exclusion of simple Labourites presumably served as a kind of Loyal Opposition within the government they operated.

As if to confuse the picture still more, Peter Townsend’s New Year’s Message to the Society had warned the Wilson government against giving an impression of being bogged down by short-term problems at the expense of long-range Socialist objectives. He told Fabians that “they will serve the Government far better as demanding, if sympathetic, critics than as captive apologists.” (5) Since it would be decidedly awkward for members of the Government to take such a stand, one must infer that the chairman’s message was addressed to rank-and-file Fabians in private life. They were urged to bring pressure on their coy leaders to do what the latter eagerly desired but preferred to do as though yielding to popular demand.

On the other side of the Atlantic, President Johnson fathered a whole flock of legislative acts, from Civil Rights to Federal-Aid-to-Education to Medicare, acts which had been plugged for years in both ADA and Socialist Party platforms. He pushed Keynesian-type deficit spending to breathtaking altitudes, and talked of extending the anti-poverty war—by then, costing well over one billion dollars a year at home—to the farthest corners of the earth. In matters of foreign trade and nuclear disarmament he offered fresh concessions to the Soviet bloc; while his alternately hot-and-cold Asian policy aided Moscow in its acrid and often deceptive dialogue with the Chinese Reds. Meanwhile, the “dialogue,” blown up, by Leftist propaganda, to the stature of a “split,” was something from which naive freemen could extract passing comfort.

In a paternal mood, Johnson even commended the United Nations Children’s Fund for having transformed Halloween into “a program of basic training in world citizenship.”(6) And yet Johnson was consistently referred to in the public prints as a moderate with conservative leanings, who basked in the support of the business community.

It is true that a select number of business executives had come to accept the Administration’s post-Keynesian economics, in somewhat the same spirit as the New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, once announced, “I accept the Universe!” Their conversion was due in part to the good offices of the Committee for Economic Development—an admitted affiliate of London’s Fabian-inspired PEP (Political and Economic Planning), which now operated on a world-wide scale to secure the cooperation of management during the current period of peaceful transition to Socialism. Not unnaturally, such business leaders enjoyed Administration favor, and reciprocated with favors of their own in campaign season.

This did not deter LBJ, however, from attempting to shift the blame for looming inflation, provoked by his Administration’s prodigality, on his “friends” of the business community. Sternly the President told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that if businessmen failed to keep rising prices down, they must expect to pay higher wages and higher taxes. It was the smoothest propaganda trick of a political year!

If in some respects, the President taxed the tolerance of his business supporters, his martial gestures in Vietnam proved no less a trial to his backers of the ADA. But they, too, remained sympathetic critics of LBJ, giving him credit for services rendered on the domestic front. In voting at their 1966 convention to disapprove the Administration’s military policy in Vietnam, Americans for Democratic Action denounced the sin while continuing to love the sinner.

No one attending that convention and hearing Vice President Humphrey’s pained defense of the Government’s Vietnam policy doubted that he was really suffering, or failed to interpret his speech as a sacrifice on the altar of political necessity. Behind the scenes, it might well have been pointed out that two of the very same officials who had provoked the Korean War and then maneuvered it to a stalemate were once more directing U.S. Asian policy: Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk. Surely their skills could be relied upon to avert an American victory in Vietnam, if only by the simple device of sending too many troops to the scene and keeping military hardware in short supply.

Had not Rusk already intimated that a happy end-result of the bloodshed in Vietnam could be the eventual recognition of Red China, an event long and earnestly desired by the Fabian-begotten ADA? Although Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. gallantly volunteered to supplant Secretary Rusk as a presidential adviser, his offer was interpreted as a bit of high-level buffoonery—possibly designed to remind fellow-Fabians that any man is replaceable, if not expendable. Whether one graduate or another of the British Fabians’ finishing school process was in charge, in the long run it made little difference, except perhaps to the individuals concerned.

Meanwhile Rhodes Scholars still manned the international ramparts in Washington. Walt Whitman Rostow of MIT’s Center for International Studies (reputed to have been started with $300,000 worth of CIA money) was back at the White House again. Harlan Cleveland held forth as U.S. Ambassador to NATO. On the home front Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach—who married a daughter of the Phelps Stokes clan, one of the founding families of the Fabian Socialist movement in America—had moved up to first place at the Department of Justice.

Like those other old Oxonians with whom he conferred from time to time in Washington, Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Wilson claimed to support U.S. policy in Vietnam. But it hardly seemed more than lip service, in view of the fact that British merchant vessels docked regularly in North Vietnam ports and British companies engaged in trade with Hanoi. Though the Wilson government procured United Nations authority for the British Navy to seize and search ships on the high seas which were bound for Rhodesia, this privilege was not expected to apply to the Southeast Asian trade.

From the first, Harold Wilson appeared to favor negotiation as a means of ending the Vietnam conflict. His initial peace-feeler took the form of a visit to Hanoi by Harold Davies, M.P., a minor official in the Wilson government. Davies was an admirer of President Ho Chi Minh, who as far back as 1924 declared at a Communist International Congress, “I am a French colonial and a member of the French Communist Party.” (7) On the same occasion Uncle Ho, falsely represented today in Leftist propaganda as leading a national independence movement like George Washington, stated plainly:

“According to Lenin, the victory of the revolution in Western Europe depended on its close contact with the liberation movement against imperialism in enslaved countries and with the national question, both of which form a part of the common problem of the proletarian movement and dictatorship.” (8)

Since those remarks were republished in Hanoi as recently as 1960, there is no reason to believe Ho Chi Minh has changed his stripes from that day to this.

Harold Davies, M.P. could look forward to a warm personal welcome in Hanoi, having written an enthusiastic article about the Northern Republic which appeared in the Left Wing French publication, Horizons, for December, 1957. It was quoted three years later in a little giveaway volume issued by Hanoi’s Foreign Languages Publishing House and rather confusingly entitled The Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, 1945-1960: Impressions of Foreigners (p. 63). When his unofficial peace mission produced no visible results, Davies quietly returned to his post as parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in London.(9)

So the question of the relationship between the Socialist and Communist movements in the present day—a question that only Guy Mollet of the French Socialist Party had ventured to broach publicly —becomes meaningful for Americans. While on the surface that relationship seems variable enough, its true nature and extent is still one of the best kept secrets of two highly secretive world organizations. Any public statements on the subject by leaders of the twin Internationals may be dismissed as inevitably misleading. Any inferences must be drawn from the facts of history itself, which records again and again the peculiarly protective attitude of the Socialists toward the Communist bloc nations and their agents and the great degree of sustained collaboration.

The Socialist and Communist world movements are like the two faces of a coin—not identical, yet inseparable. Sometimes one side appears uppermost, sometimes the other; but at the core they are still one. Which side of this counterfeit coin might face up at a given time, probably depends upon the circumstances of the moment. It is, of course, to the interest of every man, woman and child in America, desiring personal liberty in a free and sovereign nation, that the fraudulent nature of this coin be recognized and exposed so that we may be forever spared the necessity of making such a spurious choice.

One by one, the costliest and most highly prized nuclear secrets of the United States, on which the peace and safety of the whole Free World depend, have been delivered to the Soviet military clique, as a result of the consistently permissive temper of British and American Fabian Socialists toward Communist activists. Published hearings of the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary demonstrate that today, as in the age of Roosevelt, the most elementary security precautions have been scrapped by a Fabian-dominated Administration indisposed to keep Communist operatives from entering the country or to deny them the privileges accorded to loyal American citizens.

At the popular level, it is evident that something resembling the United Front movement of the pre-World War II years has been revived, to exert pressure on Socialist-oriented governments in matters of peace and disarmament. How broad this movement is may be gathered from an International Peace/Disarmament Directory compiled in 1962 by one Lloyd Wilkie of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Without claiming to include the names and addresses of all organizations working in one way or another for “peace,” it lists more than six hundred groups and subgroups throughout the world and more than one hundred periodicals. They include academic, scientific, religious and merely agitational groups, ranging from end to end of the political spectrum.

Of course, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—founded long ago by the Chicago Socialist Jane Addams and conveniently used as a cover by illegal U.S. Communists in the nineteen-twenties—is there with all its branches. The Council on Foreign Relations is listed, as well as its opposite number in Britain, The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Both the Communist and Socialist Parties USA are named, as well as the ADA; but the two major American political parties are slighted. The Catholic Worker is cited, but the Vatican’s peace efforts are discreetly overlooked.

The author explains he has played no favorites, and suggests that the inquiring reader learn the various shades of difference for himself, by getting in touch with as many of these groups and periodicals as he sees fit. To a casual observer, it is instructive to note how many of the national peace movements in foreign countries are affiliated with the World Council of Peace, chaired in 1962 by Professor J. D. Bernal, 94 Charlotte Street, London W-1. Even to reach the chairman of the Soviet Peace Committee, N. Tikhonov, whose local address was not available at press time, one was referred to the World Council of Peace in London.

While peace is undoubtedly wonderful, the motives of those who organize so-called peace movements and peace demonstrations of varied degrees of violence, are often suspect. In the past as in the present, pacifist groups have been used at critical moments to promote defeatism and to paralyze a nation’s will to defend itself. One of the more striking historical examples was the so-called Bonnet Rouge Conspiracy, in which French Socialists participated during World War I, and which led one French regiment after another to lay down its arms in the face of an advancing enemy.

In the present atomic era the chief effort of international peace and disarmament groups seems to be directed at inducing the United States to renounce its role as an atomic power, thereby leaving the Soviet Union supreme in the field. One can only speculate as to how far the veiled disarmament propaganda, purveyed by such high-level Fabian-inspired agencies as the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Assembly, influenced the nuclear pause proclaimed in 1961 by President Kennedy; or the decision of Secretary McNamara in 1964 to cancel the nuclear strategy of NATO without consulting his European Allies. In the final analysis, World Government under Socialist rulers becomes the pacific sea toward which all tributary movements flow.

With the end so nearly achieved, it seems more than ever unfair that the American people should not be permitted to know the identity of their betrayers. In almost every other country of the Free World, Socialism operates openly as a political party, and frequently is the ruling party. Here in America both the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party are small and weak, and merely serve to delude the public into believing there is little to fear from that quarter. Yet the unseen and unacknowledged Fabian Socialist movement, whose American practitioners call themselves liberals or progressives, has access in the United States to greater sources of wealth and power than anywhere else on earth. It has penetrated multi-billion dollar tax free foundations, and manipulates the U.S. Treasury itself. Precisely because its leaders are not known for what they are, they occupy a great many key posts in government today and act invisibly in union with alien masterminds to dissolve the strength and substance of this nation.

Though the situation is acutely dangerous for a land that was liberty’s true home, it is not necessarily hopeless. The answer was supplied by a relatively unschooled American, General Andrew Jackson, who fought in his own day to make America free and great. Perhaps it is only a legend, unknown to such sophisticated scholars as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., but it became a tradition among professional military men of an earlier era.

Just before the Battle of New Orleans, we are told, an unusually dense fog descended on the fields outside the city, where General Jackson’s army was to make its stand. As he rode out to inspect his ill-equipped troops, a young soldier spoke up.

“But General, sir,” said the boy, “how can I fight and defend myself against an enemy I can’t see?”

“Sooner or later, your enemy will show himself,” replied the General, “and you will know what to do.” Then, looking upward a moment as if for guidance, he added: “And in your future life, if you survive this—and by God, you will!—you will be confronted by many unseen enemies of your hard-fought liberty. But they will show themselves in time—time enough to destroy them.”

Footnotes

1. Italics added, then removed.

2. “Chairman’s Message,” Fabian News (January, 1966). (The author of that Message is not the same Peter Townsend who was once Princess Margaret’s suitor.)

3. Los Angeles Times (May 8, 1966).

4. Fabian News (April-May, 1966), announced there were 28 new Fabian Members of Parliament, and again printed a list of Labour Government appointments which identified present, though not past, members of the Fabian Society. It also listed, under the heading “New Fabian Appointments,” the following:

Dick Marsh, a former member of the Executive Committee and an active member, of the Society’s Trade Union Group, becomes the youngest member of the Cabinet at 38.

Eirene White, a former Chairman of the Society becomes the first woman Foreign Office Minister.

George Thomson, former chairman of the “Venture” Editorial Board, Summer School Director, etc., has been appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with special responsibility for political negotiations for the entry of the country into the Common Market.

Reg Prentice, another former member of the Executive Committee has become Minister of Works.

5. Fabian News (January, 1966).

6. Congressional Record (March 7, 1966), p. 4829.

7. “Report on the National and Colonial Questions at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International,” Selected Works of Ho Chi Minh (Hanoi, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), Vol. I, p. 143.

8. Ibid., pp. 143-144.

9. Davies’ name appears in this connection on the Government appointments lists released by the British Information Service as I. D. 702 (November, 1964 and April, 1966).

The 1960 election campaign in the United States marked the first successful attempt of Left liberals, by then firmly lodged in the Democratic Party organization throughout the country, to regain such unobstructed access to the power of the Presidency as they enjoyed in the Roosevelt era.(1) That, after all, was an initial reason for founding Americans for Democratic Action, as some of its best friends have pointed out.

Three choices were offered in the Democratic primaries, with Adlai Stevenson a sentimental fourth, although he seemed to have little serious desire to run again in the grand national handicap. It looked like a genuine horse race for the nomination; but in retrospect is discovered to have been what sports fans call a “boat race.” No matter which of the aspirants won, ADA would collect on the ticket. Even Lyndon Johnson, billed as the white hope of southern conservatives, had in fact been sired by the New Deal. Moreover, there were enough fiscal and electioneering irregularities in his background to guarantee his docility in the unlikely event that he gained the 1960 Presidential nomination.

Supposedly, a primary in the United States is wholly the personal affair of the candidates, with the party organizations coming into play only after the nomination has been made. Since ADA was not a political party, however, but merely a fraction within the Democratic Party, it appears to have acted from the start to control the selection of the nominees.

In the primary race, Senators Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy ran as an entry, with the former serving as the unwitting pacemaker. Both were led to the post by trusty ADA grooms. David C. Williams took leave from the ADA World to write his friend Humphreys campaign speeches, insuring their impeccable Fabian Socialist color. Senator Kennedy, generally considered an “outsider,” had a larger and more vigilant stable crew. It numbered at least three ADA founders: Gardner (Pat) Jackson, an old New Dealer hired for young Kennedy by his father; Monroe Sweetland, of the League for Industrial Democracy; and that improper Bostonian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

At a later date this circle was enlarged to include another ADA founder, the Canadian-born Professor J. Kenneth Galbraith, an authority on the evils of affluence; the socially acceptable Paul Nitze, an adviser on military policy and the nonexistent missile gap; and Littauer Professor Seymour E. Harris, grand master of the mysteries of Keynesian economics and finance. Harris was also the co-author of an ADA-sponsored pamphlet on Medicare, and in 1962 would produce a study on the costs of higher education, which he judged should exceed 9.2 billion dollars annually by 1969-70.(2)

Meanwhile former Student ADA-ers Theodore Sorenson and Larry O’Brien served as leg-men and exercise boys, recruiting swarms of crisp, crew cut assistants for every local headquarters. A well-schooled ADA member, Professor James MacGregor Burns of Williams—who had taken a special course of study at the London School of Economics (3) in 1949—was to write Kennedy’s official campaign biography. Despite his own and his family’s great wealth, Senator Kennedy did

not possess enough intra-Party strength of his own to afford the luxury of independence.

In the Wisconsin and West Virginia primary sprints Hubert Humphrey forced his younger rival, John F. Kennedy (not previously known for any consistent political philosophy) to equal and outstrip him in liberal sentiments. While Humphrey’s campaign was brief and afflicted by money troubles, apparently he was not informed in advance of his peacemaking role: he desperately wanted to be President. At the Democratic National Convention—with tears in his eyes, for he tended to weep like a child under stress—Humphrey was finally persuaded by Joseph Rauh, Jr. to throw his support to Kennedy. As a consolation prize Hubert would be made Democratic whip of the Senate and permitted to name his former assistant, Orville Freeman, Secretary of Agriculture in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration.

A reliable tip on the primary results was volunteered, as early as March, 1960, by the knowing Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. To a sympathetic newspaperman, James Reston, he confided: “Nostalgically I am for Stevenson; ideologically I am for Humphrey; but realistically I am for Kennedy.” From the moment the Democratic Convention opened in Los Angeles, it was clear to all but the most unrealistic observers that Kennedy was the predestined winner.

Despite his youth and less than distinguished performance in the Senate, he had many points to recommend him to a star-struck electorate. John F. Kennedy had the clean-cut, photogenic good looks of a motion picture hero, in addition to charm and breeding. In World War II he had served with the Navy’s daredevil torpedo boat fleet in the Pacific and suffered enduring wounds. Having produced several best-selling books, he was considered an author and presumably an intellectual; yet he was actively interested in sports. Moreover, he had a devoted family, able and willing to spend an unlimited amount of money to put one of its sons in the White House. All this, and heaven, too: Kennedy was certain he could deliver the Catholic vote. (4)

With his family and religious background, who would ever believe John F. Kennedy was committed before his nomination to carrying out a Fabian Socialist program? Even Left liberals were incredulous. Did not Pope Pius XI declare in 1931: “No man can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist?” (5) At the Los Angeles Convention Joseph-Rauh, Jr., known as Walter Reuther’s man, had some difficulty inducing bewildered ADA purists to cast their votes for Kennedy.

Rauh said he believed Kennedy to be a liberal, (6) and doubtless he had reasons. As ADA’s key man on the platform committee, Rauh knew very well that the Democratic Party’s radical platform was written months before the National Convention. By April, 1960, Kennedy had an opportunity to see it in nearly final form.(7) Far from objecting to its contents, Kennedy told Rauh that he wanted above all things to campaign on a liberal platform. (8) What else may have been said at the time is not reported. One thing, however, is sure. To win the affirmative backing of ADA’s top brain trusters and of left wing union leaders trained to drive hard bargains—and through these, to gain the practical support of the Democratic Party organization—substantial assurances were required.

Perhaps the sharpest opposition to Kennedy within ADA came from its honorary president, Eleanor Roosevelt. Apparently, she nursed some resentment both on ideological and personal grounds against his father, former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Eleanor Roosevelt’s chief reason, however, for mistrusting Senator Kennedy was his failure to have taken a stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy, bane of orthodox Left liberals and Communists in the fifties. From 1948, McCarthy had carried on what seemed at times to be a one-man campaign to alert the country to the dangers of Communist infiltration in government. In the process, he seriously alarmed Fabian Socialists who feared they might be the next to be exposed.(9)

Americans for Democratic Action waged a tireless vendetta against McCarthy through every medium at its command, even publishing and selling thousands of copies of a Senate Subcommittee report on the Senator’s personal finances.(10) In Britain the New Statesman and other Fabian Socialist-edited journals expressed shocked indignation at that man from Wisconsin who, according to them, was imperiling the American Bill of Rights—a document for which foreign as well as home-grown leftists often profess a touching concern. The agitation in educated circles on both sides of the Atlantic culminated in a resolution of censure against McCarthy by the U.S. Senate. ADA claimed and still claims today to have been primarily responsible for that propaganda coup. If so, it was surely one of the strangest cases of political lobbying in congressional history. Analysis suggests that the Senate’s 1954 resolution against McCarthy was im the nature of a test vote, demonstrating ADA’s dominance in the Democratic Party organization as well as its influence on liberal Republicans.

As a young congressman, Kennedy had originally represented a working-class district in Boston made up almost entirely of Irish Catholic voters. They abhorred Communism and idolized McCarthy, Republican though he was. In those days, Kennedy was outspokenly anti-Communist in foreign affairs; but voted affirmatively with the liberals on Federal spending and labor bills affecting his constituents. His father’s hail-fellow-well-met friendship with McCarthy was a distinct asset to Kennedy in Massachusetts. To some degree, John F. Kennedy owed his own election as Senator in 1952 to McCarthy, who failed to go to Massachusetts that year and campaign for Kennedy’s Republican opponent, Henry Cabot Lodge.

When the resolution to censure McCarthy came up two years later in the Senate, Kennedy’s voice was not heard. Being hospitalized at the time, he could not be present—though he could, of course, have paired his vote. For this McCarthy’s friends never forgave Kennedy, and neither did aggravated liberals like Eleanor Roosevelt. After his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Profiles in Courage, appeared in 1956, Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have commented that “Mr. Kennedy should show more courage and less profile”—an unkind reference to the rumor that the Kennedy nose, broken years before in football, had been quietly remodeled by plastic surgery during his long stay in the hospital.

Sensitive as he was to criticism, somehow it was the barbs from the Left that disturbed him most. “What did they want me to do, commit hara-kiri?” he asked a reporter. Apparently, the more practical politicians in ADA realized it would have meant political suicide in Massachusetts for Kennedy to speak out against McCarthy, and accepted his neutrality as a mark of deference to their side. Though Kennedy had been quoted in 1953 by the Saturday Evening Post as saying of Americans for Democratic Action, “I don’t feel comfortable with those people,” as time went on he learned to suffer them more gladly. In part, his increased cordiality seems to have been due to the discreet efforts of his aides, Theodore Sorenson and Lawrence O’Brien; in part, to his own discovery that ADA held the whip hand in the Democratic Party.

That uncomfortable fact was impressed upon Kennedy in 1956, when he tried and failed to win the Democratic nomination for the Vice Presidency. It was a fact to be seriously considered by a young man in a hurry, whose fond parents, brothers and sisters quite literally expected him to become President of the United States. In token of his improving relations with the liberal Left, the New Leader for May 18, 1957, printed a well-advertised book review by Senator John F. Kennedy. It gave favorable notice to a liberally slanted history of the U.S. Senate, written by a political commentator who later became an ardent apologist for the Kennedy-Johnson Administration.(11)

In September, 1959, when Kennedy had already begun to look like a serious Presidential contender, Allen Taylor, director of the New York State ADA, thoughtfully sent Ted Sorenson a long memorandum entitled, “Liberals’ Doubts About Kennedy, and How to Handle Them.” (12) Evidently Kennedy learned how; and it was a costly lesson. Not all the Kennedy family wealth, estimated at several hundred millions, could have paid for it. The price was his personal independence.

On January 20,1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth President of the United States. He had achieved the heights; but he had done so by one of the slimmest popular margins ever claimed for a victorious candidate, a mere 119,000 votes, in an election still regarded as doubtful by sober historians. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, for which he is perhaps best remembered, summoned the United States to “a long twilit struggle . . . against the common enemies of mankind . . . tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” Surely a noble sentiment, if pursued by Constitutional means and without destruction of the country’s internal order, or national sovereignty.

Fired by the drama of the occasion and the beauty of the youthful President’s rhetoric, few listeners asked by what means that global struggle would be waged. As months went by, the inference deepened that anyone who ventured to question the methods and underlying aims of the new Administration was a cold-blooded advocate of tyranny, poverty, disease and war. The questioners have now been silenced by the tragic circumstance that John F. Kennedy was assassinated less than three years after becoming President. Apparently he was shot by a young assassin from the ranks of the Far Left whose motives and connections have not yet been fully explained.

Exploiting the natural grief of JFK’s widow and relatives, as well as the emotions of a shocked American public, the same Left liberal clique that helped put Kennedy in the White House endowed him with a halo of martyrdom. For month after month leading to the national elections of 1964, every form of heart-appeal that could be devised by Fabian experts in mass psychology was utilized to keep sorrowing voters faithful to the Party of JFK. The same elite corps of Left liberal intellectuals, who had surrounded him as President, now sought to perpetuate themselves or their alternates in power by perpetuating the memory of John K. Kennedy—not quite as he was, but as a golden memory. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. During the last years of his short but crowded lifetime, John F. Kennedy was sometimes compared by informed observers to Britain’s leading Catholic Fabian, Lord Francis Pakenham. Both were Christian gentlemen of inherited wealth, secure social position and Gaelic antecedents—although Pakenham came from a long line of Anglo-Irish landlords, and Kennedy from Irish peasant stock. Both had style, grace and good manners, though, of the two, Kennedy was far better looking. They were frankly but not crudely ambitious. While they might normally have been expected to find their habitat in conservative politics, both found they could go farther faster by allying themselves with the Fabian Socialist movement.

Pakenham became a convinced Marxist by joining the Oxford City Labour Party of the middle thirties where, as he has said, the name of Marx was on the tongue of every student and don.(13) Kenney absorbed the Keynesian outlook almost imperceptibly at Harvard College–after some desultory training at the London School of Economics, which his biographers usually took pains to minimize. Yet both were prominent Catholic laymen, Kennedy by birth and Pakenham by conversion. Neither seemed to perceive any conflict between the exercise of Catholic piety and the aims of international Socialism; even though one Papal Encyclical after another has affirmed that the right to own productive property and enjoy its fruits is among the natural rights of mankind. Both were adroit, quick-witted but not serious thinkers, and depended on others for ideas.

At the request of the Fabian Socialist Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, Pakenham was made a peer, Lord-in-Waiting and Privy Councillor, so that he could aid the Labour Party in the House of Lords. On being elevated to his new estate, he was received by the monarch, King George VI. It was a curious and moving encounter, the significance of which somehow escaped Lord Pakenham. He has told how the King looked at him long and penetratingly, and after a pause said suddenly: “Why did you . . . join them?” (14) The same question might have been asked about John F. Kennedy.

Historically, the Kennedy-Johnson Administration took office pledged to the most outspokenly radical program ever sponsored by an old-line political party in the United States. For publicity purposes the Administration was known as the New Frontier. The label was mystifying as applied to a casually elegant young man from Massachusetts, whose entourage was heavily weighted with doctors of philosophy from the Ivy League universities. Hardly anyone—except the oldest New Dealers, and a few scholars in the Anglo-American section of Fabian Research—remembered that the Progressive left-winger, Henry Wallace, once wrote a book called New Frontiers.

Published in 1934, New Frontiers restated in glowing terms the philosophy and objectives of the New Deal, where—as the veteran Fabian Socialist, Harry Laidler has affirmed—one Socialist demand after another was gratified. “We need now,” wrote Wallace, “to re-define property rights in a way that will fairly meet the realities of today.” (15) Americans, he said, must abandon the frugality, competitive spirit and individualism of the Old Frontier, where men, “whether Protestant or Catholic, accepted implicitly the Protestant ethic.” (16)

On the New Frontier to come, Wallace said, “socially disciplined” men will work cooperatively to increase the wealth of the human race and apply their inventive skill to changing society itself. They will modify the governmental and political machinery, as well as the monetary and price system, to achieve “a far wider possibility of social justice and social charity” in the world. “So enlisted,” wrote Wallace, “men may rightfully feel that they are serving a function as high as any minister of the Gospel. They will not be Communists, Socialists or Fascists, but plain men trying to gain by democratic methods the professed objectives of Communists, Socialists or Fascists….”(17) Whatever its name, the imaginary New Frontier described by Henry Wallace sounded very much like old-fashioned Fabian Socialism.

There were at least two old New Dealers on Kennedy’s campaign staff, Gardner Jackson and Monroe Sweetland, who had worked in the Department of Agriculture under Wallace and shared many of his views. Undoubtedly, they remembered his “vision” of the New Frontier. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote a history of the Roosevelt era, might also have been expected to be familiar with the Wallace book. In searching for a label to use during the Kennedy campaign and after, which implied a Socialist commitment yet seemed merely picturesque to the general public, someone at Kennedy headquarters thought of borrowing the New Frontier tag from Wallace—on the chance that few would identify the source. If the matter ever came up, it could always be explained away as purely coincidental.

After presenting the new Administration with a name, a philosophy and a platform, ADA brain trusters took precautions to make sure their program would be carried out. In the interim between Kennedy’s election and inauguration, appropriate steps were taken to staff the White House and the departments at every level with ADA members, past or present, and their Fabian-schooled allies. Less than three weeks after the Democratic Party’s close victory at the polls, Professor Samuel H. Beer of Harvard, then national chairman of ADA, wrote to congratulate his personal friend, John F. Kennedy.

Beer, described editorially as “professor of Government at Harvard,” had contributed an article to the November, 1956 issue of the British Fabian Journal, entitled ‘Labour Rethinks Its Policy. An American View.” From this, it could at least be inferred that he enjoyed direct contacts

with Britain’s Fabian Socialists.

Beer suggested that the new President’s first public acts should clearly demonstrate his intent to build a New Frontier for America, with the help of “forward-looking” and “imaginative” public servants. Characteristically, competence was not mentioned. Beer’s letter to the President continued boldly:

“ADA has no interest in individuals as such; however, we feel that the appointment to high office of such men as Chester Bowles, Orville Freeman, Adlai Stevenson and G. Mennen Williams will signify to the world your determination to shape your Administration in the image of your eloquent liberal campaign.” (18)

The four individuals named by Beer, and many more ADA favorites, were appointed to serve in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration.

Alert Washington newsmen identified at least three dozen important officials, from Cabinet rank down, as past or present members of Americans for Democratic Action. Professor Brock a friendly witness, not only confirmed the tally; but added that the number of ADA members serving in government posts, high and low, under the Kennedy-Johnson Administration was in reality much larger than even some of its keener critics knew. (19) “The extent of ‘infiltration’,” crowed Brock, “is greater than Senator Goldwater dreams.” Just as every key post in the British Labour Party Government from 1945 to 1951 was admittedly held for some time at least by a member of the Fabian Society, American Fabian Socialists seemed to have achieved somewhat similar status under the Kennedy-Johnson Administration.

While this phenomenon of “infiltration” was frequently noted, in whole or in part, no one could say just how it occurred. Perhaps the simplest and most logical explanation is that the majority of Left liberal appointments were made through routine patronage channels. Anyone familiar with Washington realizes that a President is in somewhat the same situation as an author who receives some ten free copies of his book to give to personal friends and connections, the remainder being distributed in the routine order of business. For the most part, government appointments high and low—not excluding persons who have qualified for the higher civil service ratings—are cleared through the county, state and national committees of the Party in power.

That fact does not relieve a President of responsibility for appointments announced by the White House; but it does indicate the extent of ADA control over the Democratic Party machinery, that is, an extent necessary to place so large a number of handpicked employees in all branches of the Federal Government. Evidently, the relationship of ADA to the Democratic Party in America approximated—if it did not quite equal—that of the London Fabian Society to the British Labour Party.

Most of the top Government spots had been filled by February 10, 1961, when ADA chairman Beer and three colleagues called to pay their respects in person to President Kennedy. For the first time since Truman’s day, representatives of ADA were welcomed as such at the White House. In requesting the interview, Beer had written to the President’s appointment secretary, “I want to make it clear that it is program, not jobs in which we are interested.” After the conference, where economic policy and civil rights were discussed, Beer commented: “We felt that in both fields the President’s objectives were ours, and that he was attempting and would attempt to pursue them just as far as he politically could.” (20)

No public reference was made to mutual aims in the fields of foreign and military policy, relating to world development, cooperation with Communist nations, de facto disarmament and eventual federal union of all nations in a socialized world. Those delicate undertakings were left to selected, Fabian-trained officials and consultants manning the Government at strategic points, who could be depended upon to pursue their objectives systematically in consultation with social democratic officials abroad. White House ghost-writers—better versed in the Fabian classics than in simple arithmetic–even supplied the President with a space age version of the Independence Day comments made by Edward Bellamy in 1892.(21)

In a speech delivered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia (of all places), on July 4, 1962, President Kennedy “virtually proposed to repeal the Declaration of Independence in favor of a declaration of international interdependence.”(22) To a passive and somnolent audience, he declared:

But I will say here and now on this day of independence that the United States will be ready for a Declaration of Interdependence—that we will be prepared to discuss with a United Europe the ways and means of forming a concrete Atlantic Partnership—a mutually beneficial partnership between the new union now emerging in Europe and the old American Union founded here 175 years ago …. Today Americans must learn to think continentally.” (23)

These words were spoken on the 186th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Other echoes of the Cooperative Commonwealth—foretold long ago by Edward Bellamy; father of the American Fabian movement— were revived by friendly Keynesian economists in anticipation of the 1964 election contest. No mention was made of their literary inspiration, which was obvious to Socialists but unknown to the average citizen—namely, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a novel depicting Socialist America in the year 2000. In March, 1963, a twenty-three man “research team” employed by an organization called Resources for the Future released a 987-page report. It described the material wonders that the common man in America would enjoy in the year 2000. Assuming, of course, that the Keynesian policies adopted by the Kennedy-Johnson Administration were continued indefinitely! Financial support for the “study” was supplied by the Ford Foundation at the expense of the American taxpayer.

By combining Keynesian theory with production and population statistics, and feeding the mixture into electronic computers, the young researchers came up with precise figures on what the year 2000 would hold. Any possibility of war, pestilence or bankruptcy was omitted from their calculations. Economic scarcity would no longer exist in that future America, where atomic reactors would supply only peaceful power, automobiles with wings would outnumber adult citizens, and the average family income would be $11,000 per year (without reference to purchasing power).

Apart from such attention-catching items, an interesting feature of this forecast was its assumption that Federal spending would increase in very much the same ratio as industrial production and Gross National Product. In short, an ever-expanding government would continue to appropriate an overall 20 per cent to 25 per cent of the nation’s annual income. The miraculous pitcher would continue to pour milk and honey without interruption, while the tax pressures under which the average American operates today would simply be multiplied by five.

A demand for continuous economic “growth,” which calls for production to rise each year like a supermarket’s sales figures, was first voiced by New Frontier spokesmen in the 1960 Presidential campaign. It was based upon the latest post-Keynesian mystery: the Gross National Product, officially adopted as an index of prosperity by the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. Just how the Gross National Product itself is computed has never been clearly explained to the public. A clue to the process, however, was offered by Newton N. Minow, an early New Frontiersman who formerly headed the Federal Communications Commission.

At a 1963 symposium arranged in Los Angeles by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions—wayward grandchild of the Ford Foundation—Minow stated bluntly:

“Nearly fifteen per cent of our national work force is already employed by the local, state or federal government, and this represents almost a third of the gross national product.” (24)

So the Government can increase the Gross National Product at will, by the simple device of hiring more and more public servants— thereby increasing the ranks of an ADA-educated and chosen bureaucracy. A variation of this method of improving the nation’s prosperity-image is to give frequent and substantial pay raises to government and state employees, especially in the higher brackets.

Two assumptions dangerous to the future of constitutional government in America are concealed in the tricky concept of the Gross National Product. First, the notion that government is entitled to take a fixed percentage of the rising national income each year, irrespective of national necessities. And second, that a government has the right to base its budget estimates on the private resources of individuals and companies. Recalling that the original purpose of Keynesian economics was to provide a method for a peaceful transition to Socialism in the United States, it becomes apparent that the economic policy adopted under ADA tutelage by the Kennedy-Johnson Administration, in effect, gives a green light to Socialism on the high speed Fabian Freeway.

Dissembling their joy at the trend of Administration policy, Left liberals outside the Government maintained a critical attitude and continued to call for greater speed. For the most part, their grumbling was confined to their own special groups and house organs—while ADA commentators both on the air and in the daily press strove to rally broad popular support for the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. In the call to its annual convention in May, 1963, Americans for Democratic Action declared gravely that “the record of the Kennedy Administration so far has been one of accommodation to its critics of the right.”

The New Republic commented editorially on June 1, 1963, that “in general the Kennedy performance is less impressive than the Kennedy style.” It even charged the Administration with a lamentable tendency to yield to business pressures. “For example,” said the New Republic, “the admirable goal of the Alliance for Progress (in effect, U.S. sponsorship of a peaceful social revolution) (25) has been compromised by the Administration’s reluctance to tangle with influential business and property interests, both North and South American.”(26) This type of needling by friendly critics was evidently intended to direct the Administration more firmly on the route international Socialism felt it should take.(27) At the same time, such comments helped to disarm conservative critics and to disguise the fact that the Kennedy-Johnson Administration was in reality a chosen instrument of Fabian Socialism.

While giving space to left wing complaints about the Administration, the New Republic ( still considered the opposite number to Britain’s Fabian-edited New Statesman) was usually careful to print an answer by some prominent ADA brain truster. In its issue of May 25, 1963, one Herbert Rowan had expressed the dissatisfaction of certain Keynesian economists at President Kennedy’s apparent unwillingness to spend more money and incur larger deficits. The following week Professor Seymour E. Harris (28) hastened to defend the Administration’s record for liberality—pointing out that from 1953 to 1961 Eisenhower’s annual expenditures rose by 7 billion dollars, while Kennedy’s, in a mere three years, rose by 17 billion dollars! Harris explained in all seriousness that President Kennedy would have been glad to spend more, but was prevented by the temper of Congress from doing so. (29) Whether or not the sniping from the Left had an effect, the annual budget announced by the Kennedy-Johnson Administration nudged 100 billion dollars.

To the New Republics Washington correspondent, who was disturbed about Kennedy’s latter-day overtures to selected business groups, (30) Professor Harris replied that it is still important to maintain the confidence of businessmen. While government must be careful not to yield to their “demands,” said he, there is no harm in speaking kindly to them. By way of authority Harris quoted the oracle of modern Left liberals, John Maynard Keynes, who once wrote in a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt:

“. . . It is a mistake to think that they [businessmen] are more immoral than politicians. If you work them into the surly, obstinate, terrified mood, of which domestic animals, wrongly handled, are so capable, the nation’s burdens will not get carried to market. . . .”(31)

This humane attitude, so reminiscent of the SPCA, (32) has inspired some false hopes among businessmen, as well as some unfounded fears among Left liberals. It was commended by Keynesian advisers to President Kennedy, as well as to his successor, President Johnson.

Less than six months later all criticism from the Left or the Right was abruptly hushed, when John F. Kennedy was suddenly and inexplicably struck down by an assassin’s bullets. Before the Presidential airplane left Dallas for Washington, carrying the casket of the slain Chief of State, the next Chief Executive had been sworn in. By an unexpected stroke of fate Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose hopes of reaching the White House appeared to have been permanently dashed in 1960, became the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

The panoply of the late President’s state funeral, and the four-week period of official mourning that followed, veiled the inevitable maneuvers going on behind the scenes to procure continuance of the political status quo. Among the foreign dignitaries who {few to America to pay their final respects to John F. Kennedy was Harold Wilson, Parliamentary Leader of the British Labour Party and acting chairman of the Socialist International. Not unnaturally, Wilson took the opportunity to discuss the probable future with old and loyal friends of the London Fabian Society in Washington, including the aging columnist, Walter Lippmann. Puzzled news correspondents reported that on the return trip from Arlington Cemetery, where John F. Kennedy had just been interred, the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, made an unscheduled detour. He stopped off for a forty-minute conference at the Georgetown home of Walter Lippmann. (33) From this oddly-timed gesture, the trend of the incoming Administration might have been foreseen.

2.

If anyone doubted that President Johnson meant to continue the Socialist-inspired policies, both foreign and domestic, of his Democratic Party forebears, such uncertainties were speedily resolved by his own public utterances. In January he told the nation: ‘We are going to take all the money that we think is being unnecessarily spent, and take it from the haves and give it to the have-nots.” (34) Addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, Johnson announced he wanted to see “the Cold War end at once” and especially to see “a New Deal on a world scale” come to developing nations just “as it came to America thirty years ago.” (35) News photographers, who had been instructed that President Johnson’s pictures were to be taken from the left profile only, perceived (as the Richmond News Leader remarked) that his image was better from the left than from the right.

To the great American public, however, always eager to believe the best of an incoming President, the drift of Johnson’s statements was not immediately apparent. Even more than John F. Kennedy ( though for very different reasons) Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been so sharply attacked by Americans for Democratic Action in 1960, seemed an unlikely instrument of the Fabian Socialist world planners. A nonintellectual, whose reading matter for years had been confined to the daily papers, the Congressional Record and tales of early Texas history, he was surely no academic disciple of John Maynard Keynes.

As his biographers reveal, Johnson was a product of the New Deal school of spend-and-elect politics in which Franklin D. Roosevelt had been a past master. On the surface, he appeared to be merely a tall, hard-eyed professional politician from the Southwest, with a long record of wheeling and dealing on Capitol Hill. Johnson, however, revered power in every form and had displayed no hesitation about accumulating it as opportunities arose. Having begun his career as a poor but ambitious graduate of a small Texas teachers’ college, he lacked the style and literary eclat of John F. Kennedy. Nevertheless, Lyndon B. Johnson and his helpmate, Lady Bird, were one of the wealthiest couples in their own right ever to occupy the White House.

Though he made no disclosure of personal assets on taking office, the joint worth of the Johnsons and their daughters was estimated to be no less than 9 million dollars (36) and possibly as much as 15 million dollars.(37) The business acumen of gentle Lady Bird Johnson has been credited with pyramiding a modest inheritance of $67,000 into a handsome fortune, during the twenty-three years her husband served, in an increasingly potent capacity, in Congress. If she was not the beneficiary of special favors incidental to her husband’s position, she may be ranked with Hetty Green as one of the shrewdest women in American financial annals. White House aides insist President Johnson never intervened in his wife’s business affairs, directly or indirectly. According to John Barton of the Washington Star, however, Texans who have had dealings with the Austin, Texas television station— which is owned 84.5 per cent by Lady Bird Johnson and her daughters—are prepared to state otherwise. (38)

Lyndon Baines Johnson first appeared on Capitol Hill in 1931, just before the New Deal dawned. He was employed on the staff of Congressman Richard Kleberg, member of the family that owned the fabulous King Ranch, and a respected leader in south Texas. Although the Congressman was outspokenly critical of the Roosevelt Administration, somehow Johnson managed to inject himself into its good graces. Old inhabitants of Kleberg County and adjacent Texas counties still claim to have knowledge that Johnson betrayed his original benefactor, Dick Kleberg; but no details have ever been made public. At any rate, young Lyndon was appointed Texas director of the National Youth Administration in 1935 and was commended for rare efficiency by Aubrey Williams, its national administrator.

In 1937, Johnson was elected to the House of Representatives on a platform supporting FDR’s Supreme Court packing plan. As a reward, President Roosevelt asked that the freshman lawmaker be assigned to the important Naval Affairs Committee, and thereafter seems to have taken a fatherly interest in his career. “Free Federal money” was invariably forthcoming for projects in Johnson’s home district, assuring his election for five more successive terms. Johnson has since been quoted as saying sentimentally to political audiences, “Franklin D. Roosevelt was a second daddy to me.”

Johnson ran for the United States Senate in 1948, on an anti-union labor plank, and was seated by a scant margin of 87 contested votes. One of his more zealous backers was George Parr of San Diego, Texas, known as the Duke of Duval County. Parr was the political boss and absolute monarch of several Spanish-speaking counties near the Mexican border, where a primitive, gun-toting style of politics prevailed. In the 1948 election, returns from Precinct 13 in Alice, Texas—county seat of Parr-ruled Jim Wells County—gave 765 votes to Johnson as compared to 80 for his opponent, although only 600 bate lots had been issued for that precinct.

With a state wide count showing Johnson to be the loser by 113 votes, he made a victory statement on September 2, 1948. Next day a recount in Alice produced a new total of 967 votes for Lyndon, giving him his famous 87-vote victory. Inspection of the Alice polling list by a Texas Ranger and two former FBI agents disclosed that some 200 names had been added in a different shade of ink. Several of those individuals, when interviewed, testified they had not voted; others, not interviewed, were found to be deceased! As might have been expected, fraud was charged. An injunction was issued and a hearing ordered by Federal Judge T. Whitfield Davidson of the Northern District of Texas.

After several hasty appeals by Johnson to other courts had been denied, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black obligingly set aside the Texas ruling, and no public hearing was ever held. The memory of those fateful events, however, lingers in the town of Alice. In spite of Parr’s repeated and none-too-gentle attempts to lay the ghost of that disputed election, it has returned again and again to haunt Lyndon Johnson. The truth is, that even in his own home state Johnson was never a very popular figure. He was what might be called a politician’s politician.

Undismayed, Johnson went to the Senate and was named Democratic Party whip in 1951. At approximately the same time, a former congressional page boy named Bobby Gene Baker was engaged as assistant Democratic Senate secretary. During Johnson’s first term in the Senate, as the Washington Star (39) has noted, he served on the Commerce Committee which has jurisdiction over the Federal Communications Commission. The Commission, in turn, regulates and licenses all radio and television broadcasting stations—including the station owned by Lady Bird Johnson in Austin, Texas, whose worth has been enhanced by a notable lack of local competition. No questions were asked about the number of out-of-state business firms that bought advertising time on the Austin station, although they dispensed no products or services on the Texas market.

About a year after becoming whip, Johnson succeeded to the post of Democratic floor leader in the Senate. His young lieutenant, Bobby Baker, was promptly promoted from assistant to Democratic Senate secretary. With Republicans holding the Upper House, though only by a frail majority of one, Johnson still found it useful, beginning in 1952, to cooperate with the Eisenhower Administration. Although noisemakers in ADA attacked Johnson in 1955 for giving tacit support to “a Republican assault on liberalism,” (40) he was vigorously defended by Senator Hubert Humphrey, former ADA national chairman. Ironically, much patronage flowed to Johnson during Eisenhower’s two terms as President, particularly after the off-year election success of the Democrats in 1958 made Johnson majority leader of the Senate. His personal power and influence now extended into both parties; he was a man to be courted and feared. Bland or cajoling in his lighter moods, he was said to display a hair-trigger temper and an unrestricted vocabulary when crossed.

By applying what Capitol Hill veterans describe as a combination of the carrot and the stick, whose use was determined by an intimate knowledge of his colleagues’ political problems or personal foibles, Johnson gained the reputation for being able to “get results” in Congress on practically any kind of legislation. In those operations, it has been suggested, the stack of bank notes kept on hand in the office of Democratic Senate secretary Baker may occasionally have played a part—as well as certain after hours gaieties organized by Baker that seemed more designed to entrap than to entertain. Bobby Gene was Johnson’s enforcer and frequent go-between. One of the Senate’s incorruptibles, the Honorable John R. Williams of Delaware, eventually forced the resignation of Baker by demanding an inquiry into the latter’s far-flung business activities. It appeared that Bobby Gene had been selling everything but the Capitol dome, and had made side money for himself amounting to more than 2 million dollars.

Congressional circles were amused when Lyndon Johnson, then Vice President, issued a straight-faced denial that Bobby Baker was ever a protégée of his. The close association between Democratic leader Johnson and Democratic Senate secretary Baker had been a matter of common knowledge on the Hill. As late as 1960, while campaigning in South Carolina, Johnson told Baker’s father, “Bobby Gene is my strong right arm, the last man I see at night, the first one I see in the morning!” It was hard to believe the shrewd and energetic majority leader did not know what his right arm was doing and had even forgotten that he had one! Lyndon Johnson was among the notables who attended the grand opening of Bobby Baker’s motel in Ocean City, Maryland.

Called before a Senate committee, Baker calmly refused to answer 125 questions on grounds of possible self-incrimination. He could do so with impunity, thanks to a Supreme Court decision barring citations for contempt by congressional investigating bodies. Though a whitewash was charged, the inquiry was closed and Baker escaped without penalties. By then all direct communication between Johnson and Baker had ceased. It was remarked, however, that Bobby Baker’s counsel at the Senate hearings was Abe Fortas, personal legal adviser to Lyndon Johnson and more recently a trusted member of the President’s Kitchen Cabinet.(40a)

No rumors of corruption, but the fact that he had regularly voted against civil rights legislation, led the majority of ADA intellectuals to denounce Lyndon Johnson in 1960. Only a handful of specialists, known to the Fabian International Bureau, were aware that Johnson’s dual role during the Eisenhower Administration had in reality helped to promote ADA-Socialist International programs of the nineteen-fifties—chiefly, in the fields of foreign aid and military spending.

Such policy was normally conveyed to the State Department as the fruit of “impartial research,” via some high level, bipartisan organization like the Council on Foreign Relations or the American Assembly. Legislation required to finance it was passed without difficulty, as a result of Johnson’s cooperative attitude in the Senate. Through the patronage made available to him by a grateful Republican Administration, a number of ADA-approved Democrats were quietly appointed to positions in the Departments of State (41) and Defense—the very areas where, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. had announced in the Fabian International Review, American Fabian Socialists intended to gain control.

Johnson could only have accomplished such feats by operating under at least nominally conservative colors, thus damaging his reputation among Left liberals. By voting with an influential group of southern Senators on domestic issues about which they felt strongly, he was able to win their support for other projects, where ADA spokesmen like Humphrey or Douglas would have failed. Since secrecy was necessary to avoid compromising delicate operations, Johnson resigned himself to incurring the wrath of most left-wingers —although, as he has since announced freely, he was always a New Deal liberal at heart.

It is not surprising, therefore, that otherwise well-informed ADA leaders expressed definite resentment against Johnson during and after the 1960 Democratic Convention. Joseph Rauh, Jr. has told of the dismay and sense of personal betrayal he felt, on hearing that Lyndon Johnson had been chosen as Kennedy’s running mate in the 1960 campaign. Rauh’s sentiments were echoed by David Dubinsky and other influential members of ADA. Some threatened to bolt the ticket or split their endorsement, but in the end were dissuaded from doing so.

John F. Kennedy had personally invited Johnson to be his running mate, reportedly calling him by telephone in the early morning hours. Previously, Johnson had declared he would refuse second place on the ticket. Not unnaturally, there was much speculation as to what led him to change his mind. One realistic account, attributed to a source close to Kennedy, went as follows: Johnson demurred at first, saying he would rather be majority leader of the Senate. To this Kennedy answered coldly and clearly: “What makes you think you’ll still be majority leader?” After a thoughtful silence, Johnson yielded. He consented to run for the Vice Presidency, but reserved the right to run simultaneously for the Senate.(42)

It was generally assumed Kennedy’s choice of Johnson, who had fought him so bitterly in the primaries, was dictated by political considerations. Apparently Kennedy did not think it safe just yet to write off the Southern vote, as Rauh and other ADA leaders urged him to do. Johnson’s name on the ticket might be helpful in holding the South for the Democrats. That was the picture in 1960.

Four years later a somewhat more emotional explanation of Johnson’s change of mind was circulated. Early in June, 1964, White House correspondents quoted President Johnson as saying that John F. Kennedy had had a premonition of death and deliberately chose Johnson to succeed him, explaining: “You are the man I’d want to be President, if anything happens to me.” It was those words, Johnson claimed, which decided him to run for the Vice Presidency. If Kennedy said such a thing, it might have been intended more as an appeal to human vanity, than as a solemn intimation of his own end. Remembering that he had just been nominated and was wholly absorbed by the prospect of the political battles ahead, it is improbable he looked very far beyond the coming November. Moreover, he was young, strong and cheerful, not given to dark forebodings. Indeed, Johnson who was nearly ten years older and had already suffered one massive heart attack, might well have been expected to predecease him.

Far from being a serious contribution to history, the story released by the White House in June, 1964, seemed no more than a rather ghoulish bit of campaign propaganda. Calculated to impress superstitious persons, it gave the effect of an endorsement from the grave. In a sense, Johnson had begun campaigning for reelection within a day or so after he took the oath of office. On November 24, 1963–just two days after the assassination—the Los Angeles Times printed a feature about Johnson from Washington which said: “Mr. Johnson was trained deliberately for the Presidency almost as if there had been a premonition in President Kennedy’s mind.”

Superficially, there were changes when the Johnson family moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Chic was replaced by folksiness; gilded youth by a fatherly air, which at times appeared slightly forced. In the anteroom to the President’s office, the ten gallon hat took precedence over the homburg. As far as the staff was concerned, the changes were equally superficial. Of course, Johnson brought in his own long time personal aides to deal with the press and the public. Ted Sorenson and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. departed. The former was replaced by speech-writer Sidney Hyman of the liberal Washington Post; the latter by Eric Goldman,(43) an old friend of ADA, who was asked to set up a screening service at Princeton to enlist a fresh supply of brain trusters and planners. ADA, it seemed, was playing a game of musical chairs.

Left liberal professors in the Executive Offices receded into the background, or returned to their accustomed haunts. Jerome Wiesner, who had headed the National Science Council, went back to MIT, and Walter Heller of the Council of Economic Advisers announced he would soon be leaving. The most prominent holdover was McGeorge Bundy, Harvard dean of Arts and Sciences, who as chief of the National Security Council now briefed the new President daily. For every Left liberal who vanished, however, another often less easily identified took his place. ADA infiltration, as Professor Brock had crowed, was so widespread both in the White House and the Departments, that a few changes really changed nothing at all.

It was to be expected that Johnson, offspring of the New Deal-Fair Deal, would turn to advisers of his own political generation. He preferred them to be nonofficial, rather than office fixtures: they aroused less comment that way. The new President’s counselors were prosperous attorneys of long residence in Washington, whom Johnson had known for years. Except for Clark Clifford, an accommodating practical politician who had served in the White House under Truman, all were known to lean to the Left.

Senior member of Johnson’s informal Cabinet was Dean Acheson, former protégée and lifelong friend of the New Deal’s architect-in-chief, Felix Frankfurter. As Under Secretary and Secretary of State in the years following World War II, Dean Acheson had been instrumental in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. He was identified with the school of diplomacy which had allowed Soviet Russia to occupy Eastern Europe and the Baltic States with no more than token protest and no resistance; delivered mainland China to Red rule; and launched the destructive “No Win” policy in Korea. He was the man who had refused to turn his back on Alger Hiss. To adult Americans who remembered the past, the return of Acheson had the eerie quality of a recurring nightmare.

Dean Acheson’s role as a confidant of President Johnson seemed to guarantee the tenure of his former assistant, Dean Rusk, and the coterie of former Rhodes Scholars at the State Department. This, in turn, assured the continuance of a Fabian-inspired foreign policy which favored Socialist and even Communist nations, while demanding the progressive sacrifice of America’s wealth, strength and prestige. William Bundy, brother of McGeorge, took over the post of Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, once held by Rusk. Walt Whitman Rostow was assigned to steer the Alliance for Progress, apparently to speed the peaceful development of Socialism in Latin America, as a step toward achieving his declared goal of World Government.

Other informal advisers of President Johnson were James Rowe, Jr., a charter member of the Fabian ADA; (44) and Abe Fortas, of the firm of Arnold, Fortas and Porter, which had defended two generations of Communists and Left liberals in Washington. Once a Department of the Interior aide under Harold Ickes, Fortas was an expert in the political uses of public works—a talent which Johnson evidently proposed to utilize after his own reelection. Had not Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once predicted that the United States would advance to Socialism through a series of New Deals? While Fortas was not directly identified with ADA, his law partner, Paul A. Porter, had been a member of its original Committee on Economic Stability.(45)

Johnson had promptly named Fortas to the commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, assigned to “investigate” the Kennedy assassination and “improve” on the massive report already submitted by J. Edgar Hoover. A lifelong advocate of civil liberties for Leftists, Fortas could be counted upon to help make sure that the assassination did not precipitate an unfavorable public reaction against Communists or Socialists.

Like Kennedy, Johnson was learning how to handle the liberals, or vice versa. The doubts expressed by so many ADA members a few years earlier were now converted into endorsements, as he threw his weight behind one New Frontier project after another. The subsidized wheat sale to Russia; the campaign year tax cut; the civil rights bill which, by implication, denied civil rights to service industries and promised a return to Reconstruction days in the South: all were dutifully, even vigorously backed by Johnson. In the area of national defense, he gave free rein to Secretary Robert McNamara, the former professor who personified the dictum of Mirabeau that “to administer is to rule.” Once a spokesman for unrestrained military spending, Johnson now seconded McNamara’s “economy” program, which involved a gradual phase out of the manned bomber by 1970, along with the progressive curtailment of nuclear weapons. To that end, Johnson himself issued an Executive Order stopping production of uranium and plutonium for military purposes.

President Johnson’s unconditional surrender to ADA programs was perhaps the clearest testimonial to ADA’s position of power in the Democratic Party; for power was one thing Johnson always recognized and respected. If he hoped to be reelected, he must have ADA support. Almost plaintively he reiterated in public statements that he really and truly was a liberal, and stressed his devotion to the memory of FDR. To Robert Spivak of the New York Herald Tribune Johnson remarked: “You say I am not a liberal. Let me tell you that I am more liberal than Eleanor Roosevelt and I will prove it to you ….” Presumably, the final proof of the pudding was to be postponed until after the 1964 national elections.

To ADA’s annual Roosevelt Day dinners, President Johnson sent special greetings in 1964. Among other things the President’s message said: “I was a Roosevelt man lock, stock and barrel. In many ways he was my spiritual father.” (46) Reaction to this statement by members of the clergy attending the National Dinner in Washington is not recorded! The President also praised ADA for its “early advocacy of a test ban treaty, long before such support was popular.”

At the same time Johnson was cautious, ever-mindful of the perils of a campaign year. References to ADA as a left wing organization were stricken from the 1964 edition of his biography by Booth Mooney, a former Johnson staff-employee. A White House dinner for labor leaders and their wives, arranged by advice of David Dubinsky, was quickly followed by another dinner for handpicked leaders of business and industry. Both social events proved politically rewarding. The first resulted in an endorsement of Johnson by AFL-CIO brass at its Atlantic City convention; the latter in well-publicized pledges to vote for Johnson by a few prominent industrialists.(47) On May 4, he told a group of labor leaders:

“The time has come for labor and Government and business to agree that we are going to achieve—and keep–full employment.” (48)

One cannot help wondering if Johnson knew that the seemingly harmless phrase, “full employment,” is the keystone of Keynesian economics, an invention of Fabian Socialists created to lure the United States towards full-scale Socialism.

Apparently Johnson, like Kennedy, was surrounded by Left liberal idea men and speech-writers who could not resist displaying their Fabian Socialist scholarship—thereby betraying their own origins. Searching for phrases to describe their bright new world of the future, like the dodo bird, they invariably looked backward. A commencement address, for example, delivered by President Johnson at the University of Michigan on May 24, 1964, invited the youth of America to join him in building “the great society.” Anyone acquainted with the history of the Fabian Socialist movement knows that The Great Society was the name of a book by Graham Wallas, one of the original Big Four of the London Fabian Society.

First published in 1914, the 50th anniversary year of the Socialist International, The Great Society was based on lectures given four years earlier by Wallas as a visiting professor at Harvard. Wallas’ course, Government-31, was a “must” for members of the Harvard Socialist Club of his day. An American edition of The Great Society (reprinted in 1920) had been dedicated to erstwhile Harvard Socialist Club president, Walter Lippmann—who in 1964 declared his intention to vote for Johnson. Somehow The Great Society became the “rallying cry” for Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign, replacing the slightly passe New Frontier. If Democrats resent the inference that their Party, their Administrations and their Presidents have been taken over lock, stock and barrel by a Fabian Socialist clique, why do they insist on borrowing their “rallying cries” from books and pamphlets written by well-known Fabian Socialists, British or American?

Further evidence of Democratic dependence on British Fabian Socialism—not merely for slogans, but for entire programs—was the Administration’s “War on Poverty.” Its source was officially disclosed by the British Fabian Socialist, Harold Wilson, Parliamentary Leader of the British Labour Party. Addressing the Eighth Congress of the Socialist International, which met in Amsterdam September 9 through 12, in 1963, Wilson said: “Ten years ago some of us in the Labour Party in Britain were moved to write a pamphlet called ‘War on Want,’ which led to a great movement in Britain and has gone far beyond our expectations ….”(49)

Strangely enough, the topic of the Socialist International Congress, where Harold Wilson spoke, was not poverty at all—or “want,” as the British call it. The subject under discussion was: “The International Situation and the Struggle for Peace and Disarmament.” The idea discreetly conveyed by Wilson was that disarmament might be achieved by popular demand in democratic countries, if funds normally allocated for national defense could be dramatically diverted into a war on poverty. While the movement might not succeed in abolishing poverty, it could certainly go a long way toward abolishing the armed forces of the Free World, and their weapons of the future.

Nearly ten years after the spark had been struck in Britain, the same idea was picked up and adapted to the American scene by a young man named Michael Harrington, a member of the executive committee of the American Socialist Party. Like so many other aspiring Socialists, he published a book. It appeared in 1962 as, The Other America: Poverty in the United States,(50) and it was an immediate sensation. This was not surprising, because all appropriate Fabian Socialist press and organizational contacts in the United States had evidently been primed to push the book and to promote the subject of poverty in general. Thus, a Saturday morning panel discussion at the 58th Annual Conference of the League for Industrial Democracy, held in May, 1963, was reminiscently titled, “Why Are the Many Poor?”—the title of Fabian Tract No. 1, first pamphlet ever printed by the London Fabian Society. (51)

President Kennedy is said to have read Harrington’s book and to have been deeply impressed with it. Michael Harrington had made the astonishing discovery that there are thirty-five million Americans who are, by White House standards, poor, and presumably should have Federal help of one kind or another. Quite a lot of Federal funds could be absorbed rehabilitating thirty-five million people, even in a small way.

Michael Harrington himself was then not quite thirty-five years old. A graduate of Yale University, he had been a regular contributor to The Reporter and to Commonweal, a Catholic laymen’s magazine of Left liberal leanings. For a time after leaving college, he was connected with the Catholic Worker movement—an independent but nominally Catholic movement of the Left, led by Dorothy Day, a convert from Communism. As recently as April, 1963, Miss Day— who had visited Castro’s Cuba only the year before—attended a reception honoring the veteran Communist leader, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. On that occasion Dorothy Day was quoted, perhaps erroneously, by a Communist newspaper as saying, “My association with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn will go on through my life, despite our basic religious differences” because “we can work together on economic and social questions.” (52)

Possibly Miss Day, despite her fervor, was not familiar with the great Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, issued in 1937.

To Christians of the entire world the Holy Father uttered a warning, not merely for the moment but for all time: “Communism is intrinsically evil, (53) and no one desiring to save Christian civilization may cooperate with it in any undertaking whatever.”

There is no evidence that Michael Harrington cooperates with Communism today. He is, however, a member of the Executive Committee of the little Socialist Party, USA openly affiliated with the Socialist International, which invariably acts to protect Communist nations and in many instances promotes cooperation with them at the world level. On March 28, 1964, the new slick paper edition of Socialist International Information, official organ of the International, featured an article by Michael Harrington reprinted from New America, U.S. Socialist Party publication. There Harrington explained why the “war on poverty” would speed the advance of Socialism in the United States. The reasons given by Harrington are worth noting: first, that the program “is the assertion of a public claim on private resources”; and second, that “it will necessarily involve an expansion of the public sector of American society.”(54) A previous issue of Socialist International Information had noted “Michael Harrington’s contribution to Presidential thinking on ‘The War on Poverty.'” (55)

Early in 1964, Harrington was called to Washington, along with other “specialists,” to assist the Johnson Administration in drafting plans for its own anti-poverty campaign. Though the project was inherited from his predecessor, President Johnson had made it his own and announced the “war on poverty” as a major goal of his Administration. The campaign was frankly admitted to have been inspired by Michael Harrington’s book. As a result, leading newspapers of the country threw open their columns to the young specialist on poverty, for by-line articles as well as interviews.

For an avowed official of the little U.S. Socialist Party (56) to be so cordially received in press and government circles was something new in America. Simultaneously, Harrington was treated like a younger brother by prominent members of ADA. As far as anyone could remember, nothing just like it had happened in this country before. It raised the interesting possibility that other American Fabian Socialists might decide in the not-so-distant future to drop their disguise and call themselves by their own true name. Presumably, they would only feel free to do so if convinced that the final victory of Socialism was at hand. Did they see in the “war on poverty” a decisive weapon for bringing their long, but not wholly uncomfortable struggle to an end?

Added to his other services, Michael Harrington represented a very serious and well-organized attempt to sell the Fabian Socialist conception of social justice and “social charity” to the Catholic hierarchy and Catholic laity. It was designed to undermine one last great obstacle to the sweep of Socialism throughout the world. In that strangely un-Christian effort, Harrington and his friends have been aided effectively, if not directly, by two British Fabian Socialist waters widely feted in this country: Anne Fremantle, a niece of Beatrice Webb; and Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson), the latter described by a Washington news correspondent as one of President Johnson’s favorite authors.(57)

To head his anti-poverty campaign, President Johnson initially chose Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law of the late President Kennedy and himself a member of an old and respected Maryland family. Sargent Shriver, had broken with family tradition by going to Chicago and becoming, in 1952, an eager supporter of Adlai Stevenson. Marrying a Kennedy sister, he became director of the Peace Corps in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. Momentarily, his newer “poverty” post appeared to promise nothing more spectacular than a revival of Civilian Conservation Corps camps and similar half-forgotten projects dating from the New Deal. Its prospective importance was evident, however, from the fact that Adam Yarmolinsky (58) left his Pentagon post as Assistant Secretary for Defense for Personnel, to assist Shriver in launching the so-called war against poverty.

A young man of proper Socialist antecedents, of whom it had been rumored that he was being groomed by Left liberals to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, Yarmolinsky was no sacrificial lamb. He enjoyed the favor of leading ADA members, who regarded him as an authority on personnel practices measured by American Civil Liberties Union standards. Yarmolinsky’s presence in Sargent Shriver’s office could be taken as a virtual guarantee that the war against poverty would swell to boom proportions—after Johnson was reelected! That estimate was confirmed by a New York Times interview with Michael Harrington, which stated: “In Mr. Harrington’s view, President Johnson’s announcement of a war against poverty may be regarded as the staging phase for such a war rather than the beginning of one itself. The campaign can be started only when long-range plans that include vast public works programs are completed ….” (59)

Meanwhile, the political status quo was preserved without significant alteration. Keynesian economists were still in control of the Treasury and the Budget; agents of disarmament were in Defense. While Johnson talked of “frugality,” as FDR had done to win election in 1932, he planned in terms of deficit budgets—”under 100 billion dollars” today, but who knows what tomorrow? President Johnson asked an initial sum just under one billion dollars to wage war on poverty; another 500 million dollars annually to raise salaries of Federal employees, many of whom had received pay raises only a short time before; while 3.5 billion dollars was asked and obtained for foreign aid—”no more than last year,” but what of the years ahead?

The President promised “full employment”—and yet, by Executive Order, under the power relinquished to him by Congress, he proceeded to slash tariffs on imports priced to undersell American products, damage American industry and agriculture, and throw American citizens out of work. Subsidies were provided under the law for those who were “harmed” by tariff reductions; so that, in effect, the American taxpayer was subsidizing foreign industries. Meanwhile, American manufactures and raw materials were being shipped abroad as free gifts. American industrialists, finding it harder to compete at home against the flood of foreign imports and obliged to seek government contracts, were compelled to submit more and more to government control and restrictions. Many of these things were the result of legislation which Johnson had originally spearheaded while in the Senate. He was now in a position to exert the power they conferred on a Chief Executive.

Foreign diplomats must have smiled behind their hands at America’s pretensions of largesse, as the country’s viable gold reserves in 1963 shrank to less than 4 billion dollars over the minimum required by law to remain in the vaults at Fort Knox. With other countries holding due bills against the United States for more than 22 billion dollars in gold and able to demand payment at will, America was, in effect, at the mercy of its foreign pensioners. At any desired moment, they could demand payment in gold and throw the United States into bankruptcy. Did they delay because of trade benefits offered by the President, now armed with tariff-making powers? Or were they waiting for a moment when, by common consent of its creditors, the gold-poor United States might be forced into some supranational world order which meant an end of its nationhood?

The American dollar was no longer as good as gold. Even sheiks and desert potentates of the Middle East refused to accept it, demanding payment in bullion. How was it, with such an alarming shortage of the precious metal in the United States, that a major American oil company could still arrange to pay for its Middle Eastern oil leases and concessions in gold? How was it that we were not ourselves mining it vigorously? What was the influence in Washington that made such gold payments without replacement possible, and what political favors were asked in return?

President Johnson insisted the country had never been so prosperous nor the economy so sound—and he quoted figures to prove it. Everything seemed to be moving; everything seemed to be booming; and everything was fearfully expensive. Private debt in the United States reached the astronomical total of 826 billion dollars by the end of 1963; while the public debt ceiling was raised a few months later to 324 billion dollars. The average citizen was caught in a vise between debt and taxes, from which the campaign year tax cut offered no noticeable relief; while state and Federal politicians voted themselves larger salaries and handsomer pensions at public expense.

Who could save for old age or a rainy day? Sooner or later, the Government, which in one way or another was already collecting over one-third of the average citizen’s income, would have to pick up the tab for his medical and dental care, education, job-training and child rearing, in addition to unemployment insurance, old age pensions and burial costs. So the country went spinning along on wheels, faster and faster, down the non-stop Fabian Freeway that led to fiscal collapse—and a type of receivership sometimes known as Socialism.

This was how it had been planned, more than thirty years before, by a man named John Maynard Keynes and a small group of “respectable” Fabian Socialist conspirators in London, and by many others in other locales. They saw very plainly that the only way to capture the United States, and ultimately the world, for Socialism was by progressively weakening the financial system of this country to the point of total collapse. Once having reduced the two great English-speaking nations that were traditionally the bulwark of the free enterprise system and of liberty itself, Socialists would control the world— peacefully at first, perhaps later by force of Soviet arms. For when all is said and done, the Fabian Socialists have nowhere to go but to Communism.

By 1964, the United States had moved a great deal farther down the Fabian Freeway than most of its citizens knew. One final spurt of speed and power, and the total welfare state could be reached in a very few years. With the internal transition to Socialism apparently assured and external suasion applied at the psychological moment by a world-wide Communist-Socialist coalition, and possibly by a worldwide crisis calling for exceptional controls, the United States might be steered without conflict into the proposed World Federation of Socialist States. The rather simple legislation required for the purpose could be pushed almost imperceptibly through an ADA-controlled Congress.(59a) Was this the “fuller life” President Johnson’s advisers had in mind for America when they revived Graham Wallas’ dream of The Great Society in the one hundredth anniversary year of the Socialist International?

Lyndon Baines Johnson, former Democratic majority leader of the Senate and seasoned political manipulator, now seemed the man preordained for the job. A ruthless hand at the controls was needed, where a softer nature might flinch. Was it true, after all, that Johnson had been deliberately chosen in case “something happened” to JFK—chosen not only by Kennedy himself, but also by those master planners of international Socialism and Communism whose agents surround any modern Democratic Party chief? Surely the final push would not be wholly entrusted to a willing but non-Socialist Chief Executive. He must have helpers, alert and well-schooled. Looking forward to the 1964 national elections, James MacGregor Burns, member of ADA and former pupil of London’s Fabian Socialists, stated with clear and unmistakable intent: “Our need is not to win an election or a leader; we must win a government.” (60)

That is exactly what happened on November 3, 1964, after an apparently monotonous political campaign marked by a good deal of sub-surface drama. It was no doubt a deep personal satisfaction for President Johnson to find that the nickname of Landslide Lyndon, with which his enemies had taunted him from 1948, was now apropos. But the victory was not his alone. For the first time in nearly thirty years Democrats held a better than two-to-one majority in both houses of the Congress; and a remarkably large number of them owed their seats to ADA-COPE support. More than ever the High Court could be depended upon, in the time-tested words of Mr. Dooley, to “follow th’iliction returns.”

For all practical purposes, the constitutional separation of powers, seen by Anglo-American Socialists as the chief barrier to their conquest of the United States, had been reduced almost to the vanishing point. At long last a Socialist-schooled elite was in a position to exert unchallenged, if undeclared, control over all three branches of the Federal Government.

Obviously, the great majority of the American people was not aware of those circumstances, and would not knowingly have consented to them. Thus it seemed desirable for the Administration and its friends to keep the public guessing about Johnson’s intentions as long as possible. The President himself must speak only in the broadest generalities, and news management of the strictest kind must be enforced. For the time being, it was important to preserve the image of LBJ as a moderate middle-of-the-roader, equally beloved by management and labor, and in his benign way acting wholly by popular consent. Such considerations may explain the peculiar quality of the 1964 election campaign in the United States, where results were announced by television computers long before the votes had been counted. Organized labor and ethnic minority blocs were delivered almost intact to the Administration. Indeed, some experts claim the elections were actually won during the registration phase of the campaign, through the highly effective, if sometimes dubious, mass-registration techniques developed since 1958 by the industrial union branch of the AFL-CIO. Even in normally Republican areas Democrat registrars often outnumbered their rivals by as much as sixteen to one; and on election day were transformed into demon poll-watchers and vote-counters. One wonders whether even an Archangel Michael and his heavenly hosts would have sufficed to turn the tide, or to detect exactly what happened in 175,595 voting precincts around the country.

What the candidates said scarcely mattered. Their statements were transposed, interpreted and embellished by a practically solid phalanx of Left liberal press and TV commentators. Another unusual feature of the campaign was the vehemence of the overseas press in denouncing President Johnson’s opponent—especially in editorial opinions from Scandinavia, Belgium, West Berlin, Italy, England, where Socialist Governments held office. Was this a preview of the inspired world press to be hoped for under a future World Government?

Organized pressure, to a degree never known before in the United States, was exerted on members of the business community, great and small—the purpose being, ironically enough, to convey an impression that the nation’s businessmen were partial to President Johnson. Telephone calls from Washington warned that vital contracts might be forfeited. Credit was arbitrarily extended or denied. Federal and State agencies sent swarms of investigators to scrutinize the records of private companies and individuals. Well-timed offers of Area Redevelopment and other Federal funds were received in many smaller cities and towns. Even in the heyday of the New Deal, there had been nothing to equal this! Taking one thing with another, it was surprising that some twenty-seven million Americans were still found to have voted against Lyndon Johnson.

Tactics of the Johnson juggernaut were condoned by triumphant Washington insiders. In the excitement of victory, presidential favorite Walter Lippmann, who has seldom been known to make an unguarded statement, penned a more outspoken summary of the 1964 elections than any administration critic. “The campaign did not produce a debate about specific problems, and this was fortunate,” wrote Lippmann in his syndicated column of November 8, 1964. “For the real business of the campaign was not to map out a course for the future. It was to beat and crush a rebellion against the established line of domestic and foreign policy which was laid down in the generation which followed the great depression and the second world war.” The statement speaks for itself—and for the gentle Fabians.

3. Concerning the London School of Economics, Margaret Cole, president of the Fabian Society, wrote in 1963: “The argument which Webb might quite honestly have used but apparently did not–that the study of economic and social facts would of itself produce Socialist converts–turned out to be largely true. Whatever the political bias of its lecturers, the LSE retained (and deserved) for many a long day the reputation of being a manufactory of Reds.” From a review by Margaret Cole of Sir Sydney Caine’s book, The History of the Foundation of the London School of Economics and Political Science, The Social Science Weekly (April 18, 1963), Vol. I, No. 29, p. 26.

4. Victor Lasky, JFK: The Man and the Myth (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1963), App. B, pp. 587-598. Text of the so-called “Bailey Report,” analyzing the strength of the “Catholic vote” in the United States and circulated by Kennedy aids at the 1956 Democratic Convention. In 1960 the Gallup Poll reported that 78 per cent of U. S. Catholics had voted for John F. Kennedy.

5. From the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931.

6. Brock, op. cit., p. 181.

7. Ibid., pp. 181-182; p. 179.

8. Ibid., p. 182-184.

9. That Communists have exploited such fears, and continue to do so, can be seen from the statement made in 1961 by U. S. Communist Party Leader, Gus Hall: “No matter what one’s attitude may be towards the Communist Party, it must be recognized that the fight for its rights as a political party is a matter of defending the Bill of Rights and all democratic rights, and peace forces, and not of the Communists alone. This is an old lesson, but sometimes it has to be learned anew.” Gus Hall, “The Ultra-Right, Kennedy and the Role of Progressives,” Political Affairs (August, 1961) pp. 19-20. This was the article which–with that fine inconsistency for which Communists are noted–unleashed a general attack by all left wing and “liberal” forces in the United States against the “extreme right.”

10. Brock, op. cit., p. 146.

11. “Inside the Upper House,” a review by John F. Kennedy, U. S. Senator from Massachusetts; author of Profiles in Courage. The New Leader (May 13, 1957), p. 9. (The book reviewed was Citadel, by William S. White, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1957.)

21. Editorial by Edward Bellamy which appeared in the Boston Globe, July 4, 1892.

22. The New York Times (July 11, 1962). Quoted from an article by James Reston.

23. The New York Times (July 5, 1962). Cf. Also Harry A. Overstreet, A Declaration of Interdependence (New York, W. W. Norton, 1937).

24. LeRoy Collins, Orville L. Freeman, Hubert H. Humphrey, Newton N. Minow, Hyman G. Rickover, and Thurgood Marshall on The Mazes of Modern Government: The States, the Legislature, the Bureaucracy, the Courts. An occasional paper on the role of the political process in the free society. (Santa Barbara, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1963), p. 21.

25. That is, in Latin America.

26. New Republic (June 1, 1963).

27. It is interesting to note that this rebuke coincided with the return to London on May 23, 1963 of a Socialist International mission to Latin America. An account of that mission, contained in the Secretary’s Report to the Congress of the Socialist International, read as follows: “The Chairman of the Socialist International, Alsing Anderson died almost immediately after his return from the Inter-parliamentary Union Conference in Brazil, where he had done valuable contact work for the realization of the decision of the Oslo Council to send a mission to Latin America. The members, Max Diamant (Germany) and Yehuda Schuster (Israel), left London on 25 March and returned on 23 May, 1963. They visited the following countries: Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, where they met leading representatives of the Socialist and Popular Parties.” Socialist International Information (August 24, 1963), Vol. XIII, No. 34-35.

28. In 1947, the year of ADA’s founding, Harris was a member of its so-called Committee on Economic Stability. Other members of the Committee were: Chester Bowles, Chairman; Lauchlin Currie, William H. Davis, J. K. Galbraith, Richard V. Gilbert, David Ginsburg, Leon Henderson, Robert R. Nathan, Paul A. Porter, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr.

33. Human Events (February 18, 1964). Quoted from the New York Daily News.

34. Associated Press dispatch from Washington (November 25, 1963).

35. The New York Times (December 18, 1963).

36. Associated Press dispatch from Washington (June 8, 1964).

37. Human Events (May 30, 1946).

38. Washington Star (June 8, 1964).

39. Washington Star (June 8, 1964).

40. Brock, op. cit., p. 157.

40a. Justice Fortas now occupies the seat on the Supreme Court which Arthur Goldberg, an ADA founder and former counsel for the CIO, vacated to become Ambassador to the United Nations.

41. Frank L. Kluckhohn, former New York Times correspondent who served in the Department of State during the Eisenhower Administration, reports that of 126 political appointments in the Department, 107 went to Democrats–many of them recommended by Johnson. Frank L. Kluckhohn, The Inside on LBJ (New York, Monarch Books, 1964), p. 33.

43. Since resigned. Due to be succeeded by Prof. John P. Roche of Brandeis University, past national president, ADA.

44. See Appendix IV.

45. Report of the Committee on Economic Stability. Published by Americans for Democratic Action, May, 1946. (See title page.)

46. ADA World (February, 1964).

47. It is a fact not generally known that the business leaders who made these endorsements of Johnson also happened to be trustees of the Committee for Economic Development, an organization which enjoys the benefit of “close consultation and discussion” with its Fabian-steered counterpart in Britain, known as PEP. Committee for Economic Development. Report of Activities in 1963. From Thomas B. McCabe, Acting Chairman, p. 6; pp. 15-18.

50. According to Socialist International Information (March 14, 1964), “copies of Harrington’s book, The Other America, are available in paperback for 95¢, from the Socialist Party, 1182 Broadway, New York, 1 N.Y. In Britain it has been published by Penguin Books–price 3/6.”

56. Membership of the U. S. Socialist Party-Socialist Democratic Federation, an affiliate of the Socialist International, was officially listed as 3,000 in 1963. Numerically, it is one of the smallest Socialist Parties in the world, being outnumbered by the Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party with a membership of 7,000. (Not all American Socialists necessarily belong to the Socialist Party, nor can be identified through such membership.–ed.) Socialist International Information. (August 24, 1963), Vol. XIII, No. 34-35, “Secretary’s Report” (September, 1961-July, 1963) to the English Congress of the Socialist International, meeting in Amsterdam, September 9-12, 1963.

57. In 1937 Barbara Ward was the co-author with Leonard Woolf of a volume entitled Hitler’s Road to Bagdad. (Fabian International Section, The Fabian Society. London, Allen & Unwin, 1937). This book is not listed in recent biographies of Barbara Ward, circulated by her American publisher.

58. Adam Yarmolinsky was the son of Avraham Yarmolinsky, long time head of the Slavonic language room at the New York Public Library, and the poetess, Babette Deutsch, a life long “collaborator” of the League for Industrial Democracy, who participated in many Socialist and United Front undertakings. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Adam Yarmolinsky headed the Fund for the Republic’s Washington office in 1955, and thereafter was Secretary of the Fund. His superior was W. H. Ferry, who in 1962 issued a blast against J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Yarmolinsky’s biography in Who’s Who in America lists no investigative or personnel experience, prior to his appointment as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Personnel in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration.

59. Quoted from The New York times (no date) by Socialist International Information (March 14, 1964).

59a. On a single day in 1966, April 29, twenty nine resolutions looking towards the formation of an Atlantic Union regional Federal government were dropped into the Congressional hopper. (House Joint Res. 1089 through 1117.)

Liberal historians have been pleased to remark that the Holy Roman Empire was not Holy nor Roman nor an Empire. Similarly, it might be said today that Americans for Democratic Action is neither American nor Democratic; and there would be more truth than humor in the statement. Although the proof must at times be sought in a variety of obscure publications never meant for mass consumption, there is ample evidence that the inspiration for the organization was both British and Fabian Socialist; that its leaders have maintained close ties with leaders of the London Fabian Society; and that its emergence coincided narrowly with the post World War II revival of the Socialist International, whose declarations are echoed in ADA programs.

In that connection, it will be useful to sketch the relationship between the London Fabian Society and the Socialist International where the Society has been represented in one way or another since its early years. In 1896, George Bernard Shaw attended the London Congress of the Socialist International as a Fabian delegate.(1)

Founded in London in 1864, (2) the First Socialist International, whose honorary corresponding secretary for Germany and effective creator was Karl Marx, had been dissolved at Hoboken, New Jersey in 1876. The Second Socialist International was reconstituted in Paris in 1889, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. It survived until 1914, dominated largely by the German Social Democratic Party. (3) During World War I, social democratic splinter groups in Allied countries were utilized for subversive purposes by a special division of German Military Intelligence.

An open split among Socialist parties and societies of the world occurred during and after World War I. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Third or Communist International (called the Comintern) was formed in Moscow in 1919. The Comintern was nominally dissolved in 194041 and renamed the Cominform, and several of its leading ideologues have since held posts in the United Nations. Dimitri Manuilsky and Otto Kuusinen, prominent figures of the Communist International, have served as Soviet representatives in the crystal Tower of Babel on the East River in New York City.

Efforts of the British Labour Party, spearheaded by Fabian Socialist Arthur Henderson, failed to restore the old Socialist International in 1921, because a number of member parties demanded an organization that would unite both Socialists and Communists. Still, the British Labour Party persisted. On their own initiative, executives of the Second and Third Internationals met at Paris in February, 1922, but apparently failed to reach a firm agreement. The new Labor and Socialist International finally assembled in May, 1923 at Hamburg, Germany, where Arthur Henderson was elected president of the executive committee. From 1923 to 1938 the British Labour Party [under Fabian Socialist leadership] dominated the Socialist International.(4)—and continues to do so today. This Party has been considered for decades to be the most important Socialist labor party of the world, and has sent labor organizers to many English-speaking countries, including the United States.

From the start, both the Socialist and the Communist Internationals have claimed to be the modern-day heirs of Karl Marx, by a kind of profane apostolic succession. Neither has ever forsaken the hope of uniting world-labor in one fold, a chief point of dispute being the identity of the secular shepherd. While the Communist Parties are more vociferous in denouncing the Socialists and in practice suppress Socialist Party activities within the Communist bloc, Communist governments do not hesitate to accept practical aid from Socialist leaders abroad—and, in fact, rely heavily upon it.

Leaders of the Socialist International and its affiliates, impelled by a pluralist outlook, have never relaxed their patient efforts to persuade the Communist leaders, individually or collectively, to adopt a more “practical” point of view at home. As recently as the winter of 1964, Zigmunt Zaremba, Socialist and former member of the Polish Parliament and chairman of the Socialist Union of Central Eastern Europe, declared: “Nobody wants to deny Communism the right to exist but, equally, Communism cannot deny this right to Socialism!”(5) To more impartial observers, these rights are by no means self-evident.

Under the impact of World War II the Second International, whose Bureau was in Zurich, once more fel1 apart. During the war years, as has already been noted, the Fabian International Bureau served as host in London to a number of the Socialist International’s exiled leaders. In 1946 the old International was formally dissolved at a conference of delegates from nineteen countries held at Clacton-on-Sea and Bournemouth, England; and an International Socialist Bureau was set up in London. At a congress held in Zurich on June 7-9, 1947, a resolution was passed stating the time was ripe to consider reestablishing the Socialist International.

Meanwhile, affairs of the International from November, 1947, were handled by the Committee of the International Socialist Conference, known as COMISCO, which held its first session in London during March, 1948. Under the chairmanship of the veteran British Fabian Socialist, Morgan Phillips, COMISCO took an active hand in setting up the labor arm of the Socialist International, the Confederation of Free Trade Unions. COMISCO likewise undertook to revitalize the more overt affiliates of the Socialist International, among others, (6) the International Organization of Socialist Youth.

Through Socialists of many nationalities accredited to the United Nations, COMISCO aided the International Organization of Socialist Youth in obtaining consultative status on various inter-governmental bodies. (7) These included UNESCO and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, represented by Gunnar Myrdal and Walt Whitman Rostow. Young Socialists, who were not always in their first youth, were pledged to work for a new world order “to replace capitalism by a system in which the public interest takes precedence over the interest of private profit.” (8) The Students’ League for Industrial Democracy, whose adult board included leading members of ADA, was officially listed in 1956-57 as belonging to the International Organization of Socialist Youth.(9)

Formal rebirth of the Socialist International occurred at the Frankfurt Congress of 1951, after which a permanent headquarters was established in London. At that congress the term “Social Democracy” was made interchangeable with “Democratic Socialism,” a distinction without a difference. A second congress held in October of the same year at Milan issued a Declaration of Socialist Policy for Under-developed Territories—whose effects are still evident today in the policies of the United Nations and the foreign aid policies of the United States. After explaining that technical and financial aid must be tendered in such a way as to avoid embarrassing the recipient governments or committing them to anything whatsoever, the International – declared coolly: “It is the primary task of Socialists [in the developed countries] to create a public opinion favorable to active participation in a program of assistance to underdeveloped countries, even if this effort should entail sacrifices from the peoples of the more advanced countries.”(10) Both as publicists and public officials, ADA supporters have been intensely active in promoting long-term aid “without strings” to newly constituted governments of backward nations, some barely emerged from cannibalism.

Decisions of the Frankfurt Congress were transmitted to the United States by Norman Thomas, one of the few open and avowed Socialists still to be found in this country—the others claiming to be liberals or progressives. Yet in the January, 1953, issue of The Progressive, a Left liberal monthly that boasted of having been founded in 1909 by the elder La Follette, the League for Industrial Democracy advertised three pamphlets for sale. They were: Democratic Socialism, by Norman Thomas; National Health Insurance, by Seymour E. Harris; and World Labor Today, by Robert J. Alexander. Endorsers, sponsors and contributors of the magazine at that time included endorsers, sponsors and/or prominent members of ADA. (11) In the same issue, The Age of Suspicion by James Wechsler of ADA, was offered gratis with subscriptions to The Progressive and membership in the Political Book Club. Book Club judges were Gerald W. Johnson, formerly of the Baltimore Sun, Michael Straight of the New Republic, and the durable Professor Max Lerner—intimate of Harold Laski, of the old British Left Book Club.

The September, 1954, issue of The Progressive featured a debate between Norman Thomas and Robert R. Nathan, then chairman of the ADA executive committee. It dealt with alleged defects and virtues of Americans for Democratic Action, Thomas taking the negative side. In “The Trouble with ADA,” Norman Thomas reproached the organization for not insisting that the United Nations be strengthened to a point where it could enforce world disarmament.

On that issue, Thomas seems to have been premature, and the attitude of ADA was soon vindicated by higher authority. At its congress of July, 1955, in London, held jointly with the Asian Socialist Conference, the Socialist International declared: “This repeated emphasis on the need for world disarmament prior to the establishment of a fund for the underdeveloped nations is most unfortunate.” (12)

Extolling “The Value of ADA” in The Progressive, Robert Nathan prudently confined himself to aspects of domestic politics. Admitting ADA had from the first been “torn between the political present and the Fabian future,” he said that he expected ADA “to serve as a broker between ideas and their political implementation”—an argument for the art of the possible. Personally, continued Nathan, he was for “pragmatism with a philosophy of liberalism,” and he insisted that he, for one, repudiated Socialism!

An obvious reason for the “debate,” always a favorite Left liberal device, seems to have been to give Nathan the opportunity of confronting a notorious American Socialist and denying that ADA was a Socialist-oriented body. The utility of such denials can be inferred from the fact that Robert R. Nathan, (13) a senior official of the organization, was still able in 1963 to mingle amicably with top executives of private industry, as a trustee of the Committee for Economic Development.(14)

To exploit the classic Fabian techniques of permeation and penetration, it was important for ADA spokesmen to quash any allegation of Socialism, even before it was raised. Caution was further imposed upon the small but increasingly powerful organization by a profound popular distrust of foreign “isms” still extant throughout the country. If ADA and its chosen instruments were generally recognized to be part of a world-wide Socialist movement seeking to liquidate the United States by easy stages, they would be repudiated by the great majority of the American electorate, including the bulk of organized labor.

Nobody was more alert to that danger or more patently eager to avert it than Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers Union, and presently heading the Industrial Union Division of the AFL-CIO. From 1951, Reuther had been a perennial vice chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, and his Washington attorney, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., has held a series of executive posts in ADA. Asked on the Face the Nation broadcast for March 16, 1958, if he was ever a Socialist, Reuther replied, “Yes, but that was thirty years ago when I was very young and very foolish, and I got over it very quickly, for which I am very thankful.” Thirty years earlier, the Dies Committee was hearing testimony about Reuther’s postgraduate education in the Soviet Union and his presence at union caucuses of the Communist Party USA. (15) At that time, it hardly occurred to investigators to ask if he was also a Socialist.

Only three years before the Face the Nation broadcast, however, Walter Reuther had served on the committee for the 50th Anniversary Dinner of the League for Industrial Democracy—a Fabian Socialist organization with which, except for a brief interruption, he had been connected since his college days. In 1949, he had been invited to address the London Fabian Society on its native heath.(16) If, as Reuther said, he “got over” being a Socialist, there seems to be some confusion as to just when his reformation took place.

Adepts of social psychology since the days of Graham Wallas, the modern torchbearers of the American Fabian movement reacted swiftly against any public charge of foreign entanglements. When it was reported in Washington at the mid-century that ADA was somehow connected with Fabian Socialist leaders of the British Labour Party, the suggestion was protested with a vehemence that seemed excessive. Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, denounced it as the invention of black reactionaries bent on destroying the children of light. Going further, he ascribed it to “paranoid delusions, of which our reactionaries are the victims.”(17)

Yet in a foreword to the volume in which those rash statements appeared, McWilliams acknowledged his own “deep indebtedness to Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn, with whom I had the honor to collaborate in a brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of the Hollywood Ten.” Dr. Meiklejohn, once president of the University of Wisconsin, was a long time collaborator, official and board member of the LID, acknowledged affiliate of the London Fabian Society. Since factual refutation seemed impossible, name-calling, slander and charges of mental ill-health were the standard retort of American Fabians to any outsider seeking to link them with their British brethren.

Referring to Senator Jenner’s speech in 1949 about an ADA booklet advertising summer study-tours to Britain, Clifton Brock said plaintively, ‘`Thus the initial tactic in the campaign to destroy ADA’s reputation was to associate it with Britain’s Labour Government.” (18) Whatever the Senator’s motive may have been, the connection to which he pointed was an inescapable and enduring fact. As late as 1960, the Fabian News, in its roster of local events, announced a joint meeting of the Central London Fabian Society with Americans for Democratic Action, held on July 13 at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London, W.C.I. (19)

With rare indiscretion, the Fabian Society Annual Report for 1949-50 had also announced two receptions held by the Society for its American associates:

“A reception for James Loeb and some members of the Americans for Democratic Action was addressed by Austin Albu, M.P., who spoke on the history and work of the Fabian Society. Patrick Gordon Walker, M.P. acted as host, and other delegates to COMISCO attended.(20)

“The second reception was for the United States delegation to the first conference of the International Confederation of Free Trades Unions of the World. The guests were received by the Rt. Hon. James Griffiths, M.P. and speeches on behalf of the guests were made by Walter Reuther (CIO j and David Dubinsky (AFL). Both of these receptions were organized in conjunction with the Director of the London Bureau of Americans for Democratic Action.”

From the foregoing, it appears that James Loeb, Jr., then National Executive Secretary of ADA, and his unnamed companions were delegates to COMISCO, the Committee of the International Socialist Conference. Their host at the reception, Patrick Gordon Walker, became the British Labour Party’s chief spokesman on foreign affairs, and in October, 1964, was named Foreign Secretary following a narrow Labour Party victory at the polls. The Director of the London Bureau of ADA, who arranged both receptions, has been identified as David C. Williams (21)—former Rhodes Scholar and member of the Fabian Society, who had sent Patrick Gordon Walker to the United States when ADA was in process of being organized.

In April, 1952, according to Fabian News, David C. Williams addressed a meeting of Members of Parliament on America’s Point Four program for aid to underdeveloped nations. An article by Williams on the same subject appeared in the November, 1952, issue of Venture, organ of the Fabian Commonwealth Bureau. There Williams faithfully followed the line laid down by the Socialist International at its Milan Conference in 1951, and anticipated some points in the International’s 1955 declaration on SUNFED. (22) He assured his readers, for, instance, that the United States would not use the “power of the purse” to influence recipient nations, and said that private American capital—except for oil interests—was reluctant to invest in the program. Since such “investment” was supposed to be on a virtually nonprofit, no-return basis, it is not astonishing that private investors failed to find it attractive.

Other articles by ADA keynoters continued to appear in official British Fabian publications, never known to give space to any writer not affiliated in some way with the international Socialist movement. In May, 1954, Fabian International Review published “Eisenhower and Foreign Policy,” by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., then national co-chairman of ADA. Fabian News for the same month advertised it as an “important article,” a clear hint that all members of the Society should read it. The article was important for non-Fabians, too, because it announced with a candor quite unlike ADA’s more guarded pronouncements at home, the intention of Left liberals to gain control over both the foreign and military policies of the United States.

Its author was a second generation Harvard professor, whose father was a lifelong crony of Felix Frankfurter. Schlesinger, Jr. had been brought up to believe that Sacco and Vanzetti were saints, and that all who denied it were devils, and that radicalism was really Americanism. He graduated in 1938 from Harvard, a classmate of Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Though a non-Catholic himself, Schlesinger, Jr. chose for his senior honors essay to write a life of Orestes A. Brownson, a brilliant nineteenth century convert to Catholicism. It was published the following year and became a selection of the Catholic Book Club.

Some say the subject was suggested to him by Harold Laski, an old family friend and frequent house guest. Laski had been Joe Kennedy, Jr.’s teacher at the London School of Economics, and being convinced that young Joe had a great future in American politics, he may have wished to bring the two young men together on a basis acceptable to the elder Kennedys. As things turned out, it was Jack Kennedy to whom Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. attached himself in later years, both as a campaign aide and White House adviser.

Fluent, intelligent and supremely self-assured, Schlesinger, Jr. attended Cambridge University in 1938-39 as a “Henry fellow.” (23) Known since infancy to Harold Laski, young Arthur was warmly received in British Fabian circles and treated as a member of the Society. Toward the end of World War II, he had an opportunity to renew those contacts when he went overseas for the Office of Strategic Services, being employed in a clerical capacity in London, Paris and Germany. At that time—as he states wryly in Who’s Who in America—Schlesinger, Jr. “attained the high rank of corporal” in the Army of the United States, just as Adolf Hitler had done in the World War I Austrian Army—a circumstance which hardly qualified either of them to formulate overall military policies for their nations.

In his article for Fabian International Review, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. pointed out that control of military policy by Left liberals in the United States was only a preliminary step to gaining control of foreign policy. Discussing demands of American”liberals” at the time for a larger defense budget, he explained to his Fabian readers that from the “liberal viewpoint” the Eisenhower budget was “not a security budget, but a fiscal budget”—that is, motivated not by calm consideration of defense needs, but “by a fanatical passion to reduce taxes and move toward a balanced budget.” He added:

“I suspect that the drift of this argument has carried me outside the orbit of many British Socialists. The hard fact of the matter is that, where in Britain the left appears to want to cut the defense budget, in the United States the most effective liberals are opposed to the Eisenhower Administration’s policy of cutting defense spending [that is, as of 1954].”

Schlesinger suggested that American “liberals” had their own fiscal motivation—a strictly Keynesian one. They favored large defense outlays for the moment, not so much because of actual defense needs, as because this imposed a policy of large-scale public “investment” and deficit spending. “Above all,” Schlesinger concluded, “it has become evident that liberals could not hope to control foreign policy unless they were ready to try and control defense policy. . . . Military power becomes the master of foreign policy, not when there is too much of it but when there is too little.”(24)

Apprised of those weighty considerations, the Fabian-steered Congress of the Socialist International in its SUNFED Declaration of 1955 ordered the disarmament question to be temporarily soft-pedaled by international Socialists, and aid to backward nations stressed instead. It stated:

“. . . The trend of discussion at the U.N. has encouraged the belief that the creation of SUNFED might be made dependent on progress in disarmament . . . A world-wide agreement on disarmament would be extremely helpful; but we need not and should not wait for it, doing nothing in the meanwhile about economic plans. In fact, economic development in underdeveloped areas may itself lead to a decrease in world tension and may expedite talks on disarmament. Anyway, economic development is of sufficient importance to be considered on its own merits.” (25)

There followed in l956 the Millikan-Rostow Report, submitted to the National Security Council in Washington and advocating among other things what Senator Hubert Humphrey of ADA enthusiastically termed the SUNFED philosophy. The Report proposed a lump sum appropriation up to 12 billion dollars, to be dispensed by the United States Government over a period of five years in the form of long-term, low-interest loans to underprivileged nations. At the close of the first five-year plan, a second five-year plan of equal magnitude was envisioned, whether or not the original funds were repaid.

In fact, as the Millikan-Rostow Report (p. 79) loftily remarked, “The narrow criterion of whether a project can repay from its own revenues is at best irrelevant and at worst misleading.”(26) Most of this fantastic proposal was embodied in the U.S. Development Fund Loan Bill, presented to the United States Congress in 1957. Although the amount was trimmed before passage and placed on an annual appropriation basis, the spirit of the International’s declaration was preserved.

To induce the United States Government to adopt—even piecemeal and unawares—a program of the Socialist International, and to persuade the Socialist International to adjust its own timetable in accordance with the plans of Left liberals in America, was no small accomplishment. It presumed a more systematic interchange than was revealed in occasional articles by ADA keynoters, and occasional summit meetings between American Fabians and foreign Socialists. Regular and dependable communications were required between the political arm of the American Fabian movement and the Fabian policy planners of the British Labour Party, who dominated the Socialist International.

Obviously, the simplest control-measure was to assign a reliable agent of the Fabian Society to an obscure but central position in ADA. From the start, this function appears to have been entrusted to David C. Williams, a man of many hats in ADA. By temperament, training and connections he was well-qualified for such duty. Unlike other Rhodes Scholars of his circle at Oxford, Williams aspired to no public eminence, but was content to work industriously and almost anonymously within the confines of the Fabian Socialist movement. He was a transparency, through which the light emanating from New Fabian Research—where the policy-making operations of the Society resided—was transmitted to the American faithful for adaptation to home usage.

Following his graduation from Oxford, Williams had returned for a few years to Ohio, where he engaged in teaching, engineering research and organizational work for the Teachers’ Union. He became secretary of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, at about the same time that the British-born Mark Starr was climbing to national office in the organization. As secretary of the Ohio joint AFL-CIO legislative committee Williams lobbied for organized labor at the State Capitol, and in 1944 attempted (and failed) to obtain a seat in the Ohio Legislature.

During the final year of World War II he returned to London, where he represented the Union for Democratic Action and both the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organization—despite the fact that the AFL and CIO did not formally merge until ten years later. Williams also managed the Union for Democratic Action Educational Fund, a somewhat mysterious tax free foundation which survived at least until 1954. That year ADA, according to its own financial statement, “borrowed” $500 from the Fund.

David Williams was in London during 1945 and saw the Fabian-controlled Labour Party sweep to power. It is reliably reported that he participated in the operation, and certainly his sympathies were deeply involved. The suggestion has been made that Williams’ office was the channel through which substantial sums were routed by Socialist-led trade unions in America, to insure the Labour Party’s victory in the 1945 British elections—this in return for a promise of an early solution to the Palestine question, diplomatically referred to by Williams in his Fabian Journal article of 1947.

Knowledgeable persons regard David C. Williams as the true begetter of Americans for Democratic Action, and almost always a reliable clue to its operational policy. His articles, published by left wing journals in America and England, are not mere expressions of personal bias meant to exemplify that “freedom of discussion” on which ADA, like the Fabian Society, prides itself. They reflect the approved ADA line of the moment, as does the ADA World he has edited for years. More than any other person, Williams helped to shape that homogenized viewpoint on political, economic and social questions which marks ADA followers, for all their tendency to be critical of individuals, including each other.

Since 1947, ADA World has employed the device of the Congressional Score Card, previously used by the Union for Democratic Action. Originally, UDA collaborated with Michael Straight—publisher of The New Republic and son of its long time financial angel, Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst—in issuing a rundown on members of Congress from the Left liberal point of view. Entitled “A Congress to Win the War,” it was first published as a supplement to The New Republic of May 18, 1942, and thereafter widely circulated in pamphlet form among academic and professional groups. Each legislator was given a plus or minus mark, according to whether his vote on selected issues was for or against the views of UDA.

As adapted by ADA World, the Score Card graded members of Congress percentage-wise for their voting record on bills rated important to the success of the ADA Fabian Socialist program. Issued annually as a Congressional Supplement, the Score Card not only alerted ADA followers to the stand they were expected to take on specific issues; but also warned legislators of impending reprisals in forthcoming election campaigns. Its effects were first demonstrated in the 1948 campaign, when 79 congressmen, 5 senators and 4 governors who had been endorsed and backed by ADA were elected to office. (27) Among those newly elected senators were two ADA leaders, Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, the latter becoming first Democratic Party whip in the Senate and then Vice President of the United States. A former mid-west field director of ADA, Richard Bolling, was sent to the House from Missouri.

Though ADA claimed a national membership of only twenty-eight thousand at the time, its strength was swelled by the campaign efforts of the CIO-Political Action Committee, whose judgments coincided almost invariably with those of ADA. This was not surprising, since the CIO-Political Action Committee’s stand on individuals and issues was largely dictated by the Reuther brothers, Walter, Victor and Roy —all devout supporters of ADA. Similarly, an army of International Ladies Garment Workers and their families marched in regimented ranks to the polls, to register approval or disapproval of political candidates as rated by ADA—according to precepts and principles originating in New Fabian Research.

With the merger of the AFL and CIO in 195S, the functions of the Political Action Committee were taken over by the joint Committee on Political Education, known as COPE, a more potent and even more adequately financed body, for which ADA supplied both candidates and ideology. It was a setup similar to that envisaged long before by George Bernard Shaw, in which labor was to provide the money and votes for election campaigns—and Socialist intellectuals were to supply the leadership, programs and political jobholders at local, state and national levels. Labor furnished the real lobbying power behind ADA programs in Washington, where Americans for Democratic Action confessed to having only one registered lobbyist receiving the modest salary of $9,000 per year. Meanwhile, ADA continued to produce a stream of “expert” witnesses for Congressional committees—virtually “running an underground railway” between Capitol Hill, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Potency of the combination can be inferred from the fact that ADA made at least one-third of their proposed policies effective in Congress from 1947 to 1960. (28) This analysis does not disclose the relative importance of the policies put over by ADA, nor take into account partial ADA victories. Deprecated by ADA spokesmen as a frustrating performance, falling far short of their own high hopes, it actually denoted an alarmingly high rate of progress for a small Socialist-inspired organization claiming a national membership of at most forty thousand persons and an annual budget of some $130,000.

A possible weakness in the ADA power structure, seldom mentioned by ADA publicists or their opponents, is the fact that only a small executive fraction of organized labor has been consciously involved in such maneuvers. While it is true that the so-called educational propaganda prepared by COPE reaches millions of Americans, via broadcasts, television, union newspapers and syndicated ADA columnists, its actual operations are controlled by a few powerful and sophisticated union chieftains. They represent the Socialist-minded minority, not the majority of union labor. Notably, they are leaders of the United Auto Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers.

By coincidence, these are the very unions which have contributed most regularly and faithfully to the support of ADA national headquarters, even when other unions fell away. An estimate based on ADA’s own fiscal statements shows the total amount given directly by the ILGWU from 1947 through 1958 as $231,000, and the UAW total as $165,000. (29) To avoid conflict with the law, since 1951 such funds have been paid into ADA’s “nonpolitical” account—if anything connected with that organization can properly be termed nonpolitical. Possibly the services of Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., and the frequent sums “in excess of $100” donated by him and members of his immediate family to ADA, may be reckoned as an indirect UAW contribution.

ADA spokesmen, while admitting that in its early years one-third of the organization’s income came from labor unions, (30) point out that by 1960 a mere one-tenth of its annual budget was derived from union sources. This recalls the old story of the girl who had the baby out of wedlock, and excused herself by saying, “It was such a little one!” Whether such contributions were authorized by vote of the rank-and-file union membership is not recorded.

The ILGWU and the UAW have donated larger amounts of their members’ hard-earned cash to finance world-wide activities of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. Moreover, it is in great part due to the leaders of those two globally-oriented American labor unions that the AFL-CIO has been induced to contribute an annual one million dollars since 1955, to support the labor arm of the Socialist International.(31) In July, 1963, Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers and heir-presumptive to the presidency of the AFL-CIO, took an expense-paid trip to Harpsund, Sweden, to attend what proved to be a joint meeting of various European leaders of the Socialist International and the Confederation of Free Trade Unions. (32)

Reuther was accompanied by Senator Hubert Humphrey, another pillar of ADA. Though the two Americans were prudently described as “observers,” one wonders why they could not have found something in the whole wide world of a less officially Socialist character to observe.

Twelve months later that rustic conclave at the country home of Sweden’s Socialist Prime Minister, Tage Erlander, was repeated, with very many of the same personages attending. On July 4, 1964, it was announced in Socialist International Information that “the following have been invited, among others: Willy Brandt, Harold Wilson, Jens-Otto Krag, Giuseppe Saragat, Senator Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther. The meeting will be held in private, as was a similar meeting in Harpsund last year.” With refreshing candor, this front-page item was headlined “Socialist Leaders to Meet in Harpsung!” The meeting was scheduled for August 1-2, when Hubert Humphrey was already the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Vice Presidency of the United States.

2.

If Americans for Democratic Action in some ways belied its name, at least nobody could deny that (to paraphrase Max Beerbohm) it stood for action with a capital H. Its members were frenetically busy people who never stopped trying to promote their programs and, incidentally, themselves. Chiefly they consisted—as one ADA sympathizer said—”of academic intellectuals, the more socially conscious union leaders and members, municipal reformers, and other assorted groups and individuals of liberal [sic] political and economic inclinations.” (33)

Because of its volubility and persistence, the organization made a good deal~more noise than its size seemed to warrant. Moreover, ADA had a tendency to arrogate to itself a monopoly on civic virtue and public interest legislation. This irritated well-meaning citizens who happened to believe that desirable reforms need not invariably be achieved by the enlargement of Federal powers. Undeterred by occasional setbacks which they mourned publicly but from which they usually managed to extract some advantage, ADA’s followers continued to spread their influence, via education and political action, into many high and otherwise sacrosanct places. (34)

In 1950, when only three and a half years old, ADA claimed to have 123 chapters in thirty states with a membership of nearly thirty-five thousand. Already it could boast of having made inroads into the Democratic Party machine. Eight major planks of the Fair Deal platform on which President Truman campaigned in 1948 coincided with ADA objectives—including the controversial civil rights plank which ADA delegates, led by Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, forced on the Democratic National Convention.

A number of President Truman’s key administrative appointments (though perhaps not so many as ADA would have wished) went to ADA members and friends after 1948. This was the pay-off for contributions, electoral and fiscal, made to Truman’s surprise victory by ADA labor leaders Dubinsky, Reuther et al. ADA announced that their role in political campaigns was to supply “the margin of victory:” a formula by which a minority claims the credit for swinging narrowly-won popular elections.

By the time the next national elections rolled around, Americans for Democratic Action had gathered enough intra-Party strength to sway a majority of delegates at the Democratic National Convention. In 1952, ADA was able to name a presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson. Old pros of the Democratic Party suspected that no matter whom the Democrats ran that year, he was bound to lose. The country definitely wanted a change, and General Eisenhower with his World War II laurels and his heart-warming grin seemed an unbeatable popular candidate—as ADA had recognized four years earlier, when it tactlessly tried to persuade Eisenhower to enter the Democratic primary against his titular Commander-in-chief, President Truman.(35)

It was not necessary that ADA leaders supposed Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Socialist or even a Left liberal. They regarded him as a political general who owed his spectacular rise in the armed forces to the New Deal and General George C. Marshall, and who was never known to have clashed with either—not even when ordered to halt American troops outside Berlin, so that Russian armies were the first to enter the city. While in London during World War II, Eisenhower had mingled affably though not intimately with Fabian Socialists in the British wartime Cabinet; (36) and apparently they concluded he might be amenable to management as a future President of the United States. General Eisenhower, however, proved cold to ADA’s 1948 proposition. He waited and received a more proper bid for 1952 from a group of Eastern Republicans.

Adlai Stevenson, whom ADA in its political wisdom chose to run against Eisenhower in two consecutive elections, was a candidate of another stripe. By his own statements, Stevenson was committed body and soul to ADA’s welfare state and One World goals. With minor reservations, he had been charitably inclined toward the Soviet Union ever since he visited Moscow in 1926, as a cub reporter for his family’s newspaper, the Bloomington Pantagraph. Stevenson had a barbed wit and a cultivated charm seemingly irresistible to Left liberals, who applauded him as madly in defeat as if he were a victor.

The ADA World in November, 1948 had mentioned Adlai Stevenson as “one of the original founders of ADA in Chicago.” As late as February, 1952, the same house organ referred to him as “a charter member of ADA.” Yet Stevenson wrote that very year im a letter to the late Senator Pat McCarran: “As for ADA, I have never been a member of it.” (37) Skeptics pointed out that Adlai was notoriously absentminded. Undeniably he owed his election as Governor of Illinois in 1948, to efforts of the Independent Voters of Illinois, an ADA affiliate and a regular donor to ADA’s national headquarters fund. Since the Independent Voters of Illinois, however, had retained its corporate independence, members of that organization could still state with legal accuracy that they did not belong to ADA.

At best it was a transparent subterfuge, deceiving nobody but the general public. Both politicians and personal admirers knew Adlai as ADA’s boy. For his 1952 campaign manager, he chose Wilson Wyatt, founder-member and first national chairman of Americans for Democratic Action.(38) Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.—member of ADA’s national board, chairman of its Massachusetts chapter and secretary of its foreign policy commission(39)—was Stevenson’s special assistant on campaign issues and tactics. Only a few years before, ADA executive secretary James Loeb, Jr. had remarked complacently: “If ADA has any short range liability, it has been its insistence on political integrity.” Under the Kennedy-Johnson Administration Adlai Stevenson, that paragon of political integrity, became United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

The repeated candidacy of Adlai Stevenson had more value for ADA than it did for the Democratic Party. Even as a loser, he provided a national sounding board for ADA’s Fabian Socialist propaganda, within the respectable framework of the two party system. More important still, as titular leader of the Democratic Party for eight years, Stevenson was able to deliver its national machinery into the hands of his ADA backers and associates.

Thus Americans for Democratic Action, during a period of apparent defeat, was able to solidify its influence not only on the Democratic National Committee, but also on local and state Democratic committees in virtually all states outside the Solid South. It had a bigger voice than ever in selecting congressional candidates, and it concentrated on winning congressional elections. The results were visible in the increased number of ADA-approved candidates sent to Capitol Hill in 1956 and after. For the first time in history, dedicated if unavowed agents of international Socialism gained effective control over the mechanics and patronage of a major political party in the United States. Not even Franklin D. Roosevelt had been able to change the pattern of the Party’s operations so completely.

This situation prevailed in April, 1960, when Chester Bowles of Connecticut, a founder of ADA, and the late Philip Perlman of Maryland, U.S. Solicitor General under Truman and long an ADA sympathizer, (40) were named chairman and vice chairman of the Democratic Party’s election year platform committee. Both belonged to the Democratic Advisory Council, a Left liberal caucus within the Party. Bowles held regional platform hearings in ADA strongholds like Philadelphia, St. Louis and Detroit, at which local ADA leaders aired their views. At least four other ADA members were named to the platform committee, including Joseph Rauh, Jr., sworn enemy of loyalty investigations and advocate of enlisting the Executive power to impose a de facto merger of racial elements in the United States. Rauh was the busiest single member of a subcommittee appointed to draft the Party platform.

In all but wording, the final document approved by the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles and ironically entitled “The Rights of Man,” was a replica of the platform adopted by ADA at its own annual convention. (41) Besides a provocative civil rights plank, openly inviting civil disturbances, it contained a civil liberties plank dictated by Rauh that might, if enacted into law, seriously impede the FBI in collecting evidence on cases of espionage or treason for prosecution by the U.S. Attorney General. Even so tolerant an observer as Professor Brock has described the 1960 Democrat platform as the most radical ever adopted by a major political party in this country. Far from being discarded at a later date as mere campaign oratory, it became the visible operating program of the Kennedy-Johnson Administration.

In the field of higher education, Students for Democratic Action (SDA) had been established by 1950 on 100 colleges and campuses. Its revolving membership was described merely as “exceeding 3000.”(42) Based on the same arithmetic, it can be computed that within ten years quite a few thousands of those anonymous trainees held positions in government, private industry, research foundations and the teaching profession. Normally, the better positions were obtained on the strength of superior college grades and recommendations supplied by liberal professors and deans.

A true-life Horatio Alger story of the Left may be seen in the career of Theodore Sorensen, once a model SDA member at the University of Nebraska. Sorensen’s father had been campaign manager for Senator George Norris—original sponsor of TVA and one of those Progressive Republicans known in their day as the sons of the wild jackass. While still in law school, young Ted lobbied at the State Legislature for a Fair Employment Practices Act. He registered with his local draft board as a conscientious objector, following the pacifist example set by his parents.

At the age of twenty-three, Ted Sorensen went to Washington, poor and apparently friendless. There he found work with the Government in a series of routine jobs; but continued dutifully to attend ADA conventions. He soon attracted the notice of powerful patrons. Less than two years after arriving in the nation’s capital, he was recommended by Senator Paul Douglas of ADA for the position of legislative aide to the newly elected and very wealthy junior Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. After interviewing his prospective employer to make sure the two of them were “not too far apart on basic policy,” Sorensen took the job. Eight years later he accompanied his boss to the White House, in the capacity of confidential assistant.(43)

From conversations with several hundred present-day college students in various parts of the country, it is evident to this writer that a strong reason for the appeal of Left liberalism to aspiring youth has been the diligence of adult ADA members in acting as an unofficial placement service. At the same time, Left-leaning professors—whose own tenure is assured by the joint ADA-Civil Liberties Union battles for so-called academic freedom—can threaten conservative students with failure and loss of credits for giving “wrong answers” in opinion-forming courses.(44) Thus traditional American values are reversed, with Left liberalism becoming entrenched as the current status quo.

Like members of the Fabian Society who took positions with the Federation of British Industries, ADA members entering industry or public service usually renounced any formal connection with ADA. They became part of a diffused but growing army of ADA nonmembers advancing that organization’s ideas in ever-widening areas of American life. While ADA’s official membership figures remained in the vicinity of thirty-five to forty thousand, the range of its contacts expanded progressively throughout the apparently frustrating fifties.

In l957, Americans for Democratic Action convened to celebrate its 10th anniversary, meeting once more for sentimental reasons at the Willard Hotel in Washington. Twelve hundred delegates attended from all parts of the country. Old-timers of the League for Industrial Democracy were still very much in evidence. Speakers included the perennial Senators Douglas, Humphrey and Neuberger, with Wayne Morse of Oregon added to the list. (45) (Senator Morse’s melodramatic move from the Republican to the Democratic side of the Senate aisle did not alter the fact that he was first and foremost a Socialist both in words and deeds.) Walter Reuther, James B. Carey, A. Philip Randolph spoke for the unions, some of which after straying away had returned that year to the fold. (46) Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Harvard historian, composed a not unflattering history of ADA for the occasion.

Conspicuous among the newer recruits was the towering figure and booming voice of Governor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin of Maryland, (47) who had placed the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower in nomination at the Republican National Convention of 1952. Governor McKeldin’s presence indicated that during the past decade ADA had also made some slight progress in permeating the Republican Party. Theoretically, it was the purpose of ADA to work inside both major parties, in order to gain dual support for its own Fabian Socialist programs. In July, 1950, former Attorney General Francis Biddle, testifying before a Congressional Committee as national chairman of ADA, reaffirmed this intention, while disclaiming any Socialist bias. “My thought,” said Biddle, “is that we operate 90-some per cent in the Democratic area and a very small per cent in the Republican— and oh! that the Republican area were larger!” (48)

At that time Biddle was asked, “Have you [in the ADA] ever supported any Republican candidates?” He replied, “Yes, in the New York Mayoralty election we supported Newbold Morris against O’Dwyer.” (Newbold Morris, it may be recalled, addressed the LID’s 40th Anniversary Dinner in 1945, and there uttered warm words of praise for Norman Thomas.) Biddle further noted that ADA had backed Congressmen Richard Hoffman of Chicago and Jacob Javits of New York.

Since the price of ADA endorsement is support of its policies, the path pursued by its favorites can be surmised. During eight years as a Republican Congressman, Jacob K. Javits voted the ADA way on 82 of 87 roll calls and earned a rating of 94 per cent on its Score Card. (49) Despite his fidelity Javits failed to get official ADA backing when he ran for the office of New York Attorney General in 1954. The alleged reason was that his rival, former Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., had a pluperfect ADA voting record. While some of Javits’ friends professed to regard this as base ingratitude, it is unlikely Javits saw it that way. For the first time in his life, he needed conservative upstate votes to win.

Born and bred on New York City’s lower East Side, a cherished speaker for years at LID (50) functions and those of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Javits required no printed endorsement to carry Manhattan, the Bronx and much of Brooklyn. He could hardly have lost the garment workers’ vote if he had tried. On the other hand, a public announcement of ADA support, confirming rumors of his radical ties, might have been the kiss of death for Javits in suburban and upstate districts. A shrewd and accomplished campaigner, he could manage very well without such endorsement. From the apparently disinterested regularity with which he has voted for ADA programs ever since, it was obvious he harbored no grudge. As the senior senator from New York State in 1963, Javits still scored 94 per cent by ADA standards (51)—higher than any other senator on the Republican side of the aisle. Of course, he firmly denies being a Socialist.

ADA and labor union endorsements of political candidates are often separate but identical, especially if the union in question is the ILGWU. As the British-born Socialist, Mark Starr, explained, however, the complexion of the minority groups composing the ILGWU’s rank-and-file has altered over the years. A large proportion of the membership—which remains numerically stable, despite a heavy turnover in individual members—now consists of Negro, Puerto Rican and Mexican women.(52) The sole political issue that really engrosses them is civil rights; so in a sense, the fate of the ILGWU leadership may be said to hinge on that issue.

The old immigrant garment-maker from Eastern Europe is no more —except for a little group of laborites, whom David Dubinsky is said to have “rescued from the Nazis in Poland” during World War II, and brought to this country. (53) One of the latter, Henoch Mendelsund, today heads the ILGWU’s potent Joint Dress Board. As for the children and grandchildren of older European radicals who founded the garment workers union, they have prospered under the American system and many are today doctors, lawyers, college professors and civil servants. Far from becoming what the old-style unionist contemptuously referred to as “alrightniks,” a number of them are now the backbone of the Fabian Socialist ADA.

The present-day ILGWU not only endorses candidates, but also instructs its four hundred thousand plus members, their families and friends how to vote. It organizes union participation in political campaigns, to an extent not permitted by law even in Britain. In New York City the ILGWU, acting jointly with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, has organized a private political party: the so-called Liberal Party, which elects its own captive congressmen and also has an important voice in the City and State governments. Elsewhere the ILGWU adapts its political activities to the local scene.

An official report of the General Executive Board to the ILGWU convention, meeting in May, 1962, at Atlantic City, told how the union “played a critical part in four important contests throughout the nation, aside from the national election of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in November, 1960.” In San Antonio, Texas, for example:

“. . . former ILGWU staff member Henry Gonzales won a special election to fill a vacancy. Gonzales is the first American of Mexican background to be elected to Congress from Texas. For years he was a vigorous champion of civil rights as a member of the Texas State Senate. Several minutes after taking his oath as a Congressman, he handed the clerk of the House a bill calling for abolition of the poll tax. Within 48 hours after his election, Gonzales, after visiting with Pres. Dubinsky in the General Office, pitched into a 12-hour whirlwind drive throughout New York City in behalf of Mayor Wagner’s candidacy.” (54)

Gonzales gained some newspaper notoriety in 1963, reportedly for slugging a fellow-congressman who had referred to him as a radical.

Like Americans for Democratic Action, the ILGWU has occasionally supported Republicans in city or state elections—or else has appeared to give them an even break. Two contests in New Jersey involving Republicans were mentioned in the report of the Executive Board: (55)

“The peculiar feature of the New Jersey election in November, 1961 was the fact that two men classified as liberals were in a contest for the office of governor. The Republican candidate, former Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell, had won the nomination in a primary contest against a conservative opponent.

“He then faced the liberal Democratic nominee, Richard Hughes. Because both candidates were broadly ‘1iberal,’ ILGWU units made their own choices in endorsements. It was apparent from the results which, despite contrary predictions, brought victory for Hughes, that garment workers and others clearly perceived the difference in his favor.

“In this instance, the ILGWU followed an earlier precedent: In 1960, Jersey ILGers, acting on the basis of Republican Senator Case’s liberal record, endorsed both him and Democratic candidate Lord. Case won reelection.” (56)

Senator Case in 1963 rated a high 88 per cent on the ADA Score Card.

For the Presidency and Vice Presidency, ADA and its allies have supported none but Democratic Party candidates to date. They have often been accused, however, of seeking to influence pro or con the Republican Party’s choice of nominees. Aside from the fact that left wing labor groups have been known to work in Republican primaries for the defeat of conservative candidates, and that ADA publicists always offer the Republican Party a great deal of unsolicited and somewhat suspect advice, evidence of ADA intervention is purely circumstantial. The’ case most frequently cited is that of the Republican Advance, a high level caucus of Eastern Republicans believed to have long since faded away.

Early in July, 1950,—just before former Attorney General Biddle on July 7, 1950, confessed to a House Committee ADA’s deep desire to extend its influence in Republican circles—Republicans from ten Eastern states held a week-long meeting and formed the Republican Advance Committee. Its declared object was to develop a program for the Republican Party that could compete successfully with the New Deal-Fair Deal program. A less advertised purpose was to select a Republican standard-bearer for 1952 other than Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, Republican leader on Capitol Hill.

Among political figures involved in the Advance, before or after its creation, were: Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, titular head of the Republican Party, and his close associate, Herbert Brownell, who became Attorney General in the Eisenhower Cabinet; Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, later Ambassador to the United Nations, and his brother, Governor John Lodge of Connecticut, later Ambassador to Spain; Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont; and New Hampshire’s Governor Sherman Adams of unhappy memory. It was this group which invited General Eisenhower to run for the Presidency in 1952, and which steered him into the White House.

Financial backers of the Republican Advance were reported to include Nelson A. Rockefeller, who became Under Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the Eisenhower Administration, and Sidney J. Weinberg, a partner in the Wall Street firm of Goldman, Sachs and a member since 1933 of the Business Advisory Council of the Department of Commerce, now called the Business Council. Only persons in the Advance group visibly associated with ADA were Russell Davenport, (57) an editor of Fortune magazine, and Governor McKeldin of Maryland.

Any part ADA may have played in instigating the Republican Advance is not susceptible of proof. It can merely be pointed out that the Fabian technique of permeation, as defined by Margaret Cole, envisaged persuading nonmembers of the Society to carry out, often unconsciously, the work and the will of Fabians. This has been the technique most often used by Left liberals of the United States in attempting to gain a foothold in Republican councils—as contrasted with their more direct and widespread penetration of the Democratic Party. It can also be said that in some respects the original aims of the Republican Advance were not displeasing to ADA.

Admittedly, ADA had a prime interest in blocking the Presidential nomination of Senator Taft, a man of strongly defined conservative principles. Labor’s Political Action Committee had denounced him for his joint authorship of the Taft-Hartley Act, since invoked by Democrat and Republican Presidents alike in moments of threatened national crisis. Yet Taft always carried his own heavily unionized state of Ohio by large majorities. For many months before the Republican Convention of 1952, ADA’s ever-growing corps of news commentators, political pollsters and syndicated columnists assisted in spreading the lethal rumor: “Taft can’t win!” A somewhat comparable situation arose in 1963-64, when political seers throughout the country united as if with one voice to downgrade the popular appeal of Senator Barry Goldwater.

In 1959, an ADA publicist engaged once more in the gratuitous sport of trying to pick a future Republican Presidential candidate. The Progressive for February, 1959, carried an article entitled “Rockefeller in Washington,” by David C. Williams, editor of the official ADA World and voice of the Fabian Society in America. Williams compared Nelson A. Rockefeller’s “blinding charm” to that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He explained that Rockefeller, by virtue of a long record of collaboration with New Deal-Fair Deal programs, had personally succeeded in “transcending’ the traditions of his party. Finally, Williams suggested that if Nelson Rockefeller were able to “escape the limitations of his own party” and “tap fresh sources of power” he might make an acceptable President by Left liberal standards.(58)

Variously referred to in British Fabian Socialist literature as international director and research-and-educational director of Americans for Democratic Action, David Williams had stated in an earlier work, The Intelligent Socialist’s Guide to America: “ADA is not a political party. It operates very much as the early Fabian Society did seeking to permeate the existing parties.” In advising Left liberals that Nelson Rockefeller was a promising medium for permeating the Republican Party at the top, Williams was merely perpetuating a time-honored tactic of American as well as British Fabian Socialists. Fabians had long concentrated on “educating” the offspring of prominent families —partly, perhaps, with a view to traducing famed conservative names.

Nelson Rockefeller seems to have been exposed to such psychological seduction since childhood. As a boy he attended the experimental Lincoln School, together with three of his brothers, Winthrop, Lawrence and David. The Lincoln School was operated by Columbia University’s School of Education, then dominated by the ideas of John Dewey, father of so-called Progressive Education and a president of the Fabian Socialist LID. There a sense of personal guilt for all the world’s ills was instilled into young scions of wealth, who were simultaneously reminded of their duty to help fashion a new and better social order.

In his adult years, Nelson Rockefeller often referred to the New Order that was bound to come. As late as 1962, he was praised by Left liberals as the author of a book called The Future of Federalism. It has been described by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas as a “plea for a ‘new world order’ with the United States taking the lead in fashioning a new federalism at the world level.” In other words, Rockefeller called openly for a type of World Government similar to that urged by Walt Whitman Rostow and others—where the independence of the United States, as we have known it, will be abolished.(59) Reviewing Rockefeller’s book for the Washington Post, Justice Douglas wrote, rather strangely for one entrusted with preserving the United States Constitution:

“He [Rockefeller] does the nation great service when he propounds the theme of this book…. It is bold in conception and sets America’s sights high.”(60)

Summoned to Washington during World War II with other Republicans whom FDR had recruited in the name of national unity, “Rockefeller surrounded himself,” says David C. Williams, “with forward-looking staff members, whose ideas he eagerly solicited and put to use.” (61) Others have noted that the wartime agency which Rockefeller headed, as Coordinator of Inter American Affairs, contained an inordinate number of Communist fellow-travelers and assorted Left liberals. Rockefeller reappeared in Washington in 1950, as chairman of Truman’s International Development Advisory Board, assigned to draft plans for United States aid to underdeveloped nations. Through the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund, he issued a report, Partners in Progress, “calculated [as Williams says] to make a maximum impact on public opinion.”

The happy if unbusinesslike idea of an equal partnership between rich and poor nations was of British Fabian Socialist origin. The Fabian Journal for June 7, l9S2, (pp. 20ff.), carried an unsigned article, “Advance to Democracy: A Report to the Fabian Colonial Bureau on the Implications of ‘Partnership’ in Multi-Racial Societies.” Ernest Davies, Fabian Member of Parliament and son of the former Fabian Society chairman, A. Emil Davies, was among the chief spokesmen for this radical interpretation of “Partnership.”

It may be recalled that Ernest Davies worked in New York City during the nineteen-twenties as a newspaper reporter. Davies was the presiding officer in l954 and l955 of the first and second London Parliamentary Conference on World Government, which evolved two schemes for revision of the United Nations charter looking toward the creation of a World Government. According to letters received from participants, the second Conference decided to set schemes of World Government aside temporarily, in favor of a World Development Program. It is significant that the slogan of “Partnership”(62)—like the term “Fair Shares,” which in America became Truman’s Fair Deal—originated in a Fabian Socialist bureau in London.

As a private citizen, Rockefeller organized a National Conference on International Economic and Social Development in 1952. He criticized the limited aid given by the Truman Administration to backward countries and urged that such aid be continued on a more lavish scale under the Eisenhower Administration. In particular, he called it “disastrous” to have made economic aid an adjunct to military aid under the Mutual Security Act.

While it may be questioned whether Rockefeller realized he was serving the interests of the Socialist International more effectively than the interests of the United States, some members of his “forward-looking” staff were probably very aware of the implications. No doubt he also had a certain mundane interest in opening up new lands for oil exploration and new markets for Standard Oil products—never suspecting that opportunities for private enterprise were due to be severely limited, under the Socialist International’s plan for World Development.

As Under Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the Eisenhower Administration, Nelson Rockefeller insisted that all “security” cases be routed to him for review. (63) David Williams remarked approvingly that Rockefeller “was consistently liberal in his judgment on borderline cases—and his New Deal background was such that the appearance of the names of liberal [sic] organizations in a civil servant’s file did not alarm him, as it did many others ….” Among those others was the Secretary, Oveta Culp Hobby, a peppery and patriotic lady from Texas who once headed the Women’s Army Corps. For one reason or another, Rockefeller soon found himself forced to resign, but he persuaded Sherman Adams, presidential major domo, to create for him the novel post of special assistant to the President for foreign affairs.

David Williams makes much of the fact that Nelson Rockefeller— who was elected Governor of New York State in 1958 and 1962–worked serenely with the New Deal-Fair Deal in Washington, but was unhappy under the Eisenhower Administration. Williams suggests that Rockefeller’s basic mistake in politics has been the wrong choice of party. Apparently, an attempt was made in the forties to enroll him in the Democratic Party—like another born Republican of vast weald~, considerable social charm and none too profound intelligence, W. Averell Harriman, who had joined the Democrats long before. In spite of all temptations, Rockefeller remained for utilitarian reasons a Republican. Among the reasons he has given for doing so, perhaps the most interesting as well as the most cynical is quoted by David C. Williams:

“Liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats often advocate the same programs,” said Nelson Rockefeller, “but the Republicans have the advantage that they can execute them without destroying the confidence of business. . . .” (64)

2. Yearbook of the International Socialist Labour Movement, 1956-1957. Edited by Julius Braunthal, Secretary of the Socialist International. Under the auspices of the Socialist International and the Asian Socialist Conference (London, Lincolns-Prager, 1956), pp. 26-36.

6. Other integrated affiliates of the Socialist International are: the Asian Socialist Conference; the International Council of Social Democratic Women; the Socialist Union of Central-Eastern Europe; the International Union of Social Democratic Teachers.

7. Other inter-governmental organizations in which the International Organization of Socialist Youth enjoys consultative status are: the U.N. Economic and Social Council; the U. N. Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East; U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America; U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization; International Labor Organization; World Health Organization; High Commissioner for Refugees; Council of Europe; Conference of Consultative Non-Governmental Organizations, World Federation of United Nations Associations; International Student Movement for the United Nations; coordinating Secretariat of the National Unions of Students; European Youth Council. Yearbook of the International Socialist Labour Movement, 1956-1957, p. 106. (See Bibliography.)

12. Yearbook of the International Socialist Labour Movement, 1956-1957, p. 54. (See Bibliography). “The Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development (SUNFED): Joint Statement adopted by the Fourth Congress of the Socialist International and the Asian Socialist Conference.” This statement also declared (p. 53): “The policy of the borrowing countries . . . is definitely to restrict the influx of further private capital. Private investment cannot, therefore, be relied upon as the main source for the capital requirements of the underdeveloped countries. The Socialist parties in particular would not contemplate with equanimity an increase in private investors’ control over the economy of these countries.

“This leaves public investment as the real main source of external capital requirements.”

13. Previously Robert R. Nathan held high Government posts in the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. During World War II he was chairman of the Planning Committee of the War Production Board and deputy director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. With ADA backing, he became a consultant to the President’s Committee on Economic Security, and was named economic adviser to France, Burma and the United Nations’ Korean Reconstruction Agency.

15. Investigation of Un-American Propaganda in the United States. Hearings before a Special Committee, House of Representatives, 75th Congress (Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1938), Vol. III, pp. 2188 ff.

21. In August, 1949 The Progressive printed an article by David C. Williams, “Labor Under a Labor Regime,” an account of the British Labour Party in power. A biographical note described Williams as “London representative of Americans for Democratic Action,” adding that “his articles have appeared in The Nation, Labor and Nation and the New Leader.

29. These figures are based on average annual contributions of $21,000 from the ILGWU and $15,000 from the UAW over a period of 11 years. A list of contributions to ADA, in excess of $100, is filed annually with the Clerk of the House of Representatives under terms of the Corrupt Practices Act. It does not include donations to local and state branches of ADA or its affiliates. The same source also reveals that from 1951 to 1958 fourteen labor unions contributed a grand total of $350,546.40 to the national headquarters of ADA.

32. Socialist International Information (August 3, 1963), Vol. XIII, No. 31-32. The item states, “Among those present were: Eric Ollenhauer, Herbert Wehner, and Willi Brandt (the Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the German Social Democratic Party), Harold Wilson (Leader of the British Labour Party), Niels Mathiassen (Secretary of the Danish Social Democratic Party), Tryggve Bratteli (Vice-Chairman of the Norwegian Social Democratic Party), Tage Erlander (Prime Minister of Sweden and Chairman of the Swedish Social Democratic Party), the leaders of the Swedish, Norwegian and German Trades Union Congresses, Arne Geijer, Konrad Nordahl and Ludwig Rosenburg, Hubert Humphrey (American Senator) and Walter Reuther (Leader of the American Automobile Works Union).”

36. Few Americans recall today that Clement R. Attlee was Churchill’s Deputy Prime Minister during World War II.

37. Washington, Post (August 30, 1952).

38. As of 1964, Wilson Wyatt was Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky, having previously failed to win the race for a seat in the U. S. Senate. He illustrates the tendency of ADA followers to settle for state or local offices, when blocked in their quest for national office.

39. These were the posts held by Schlesinger in 1950, according to former Attorney General Francis Biddle. Lobbying, Direct and Indirect, p. 30. (See Bibliography).

40. Brock, op. cit., p. 179.

41. On July 7, 1960 Joseph Rauh, Jr. apprised the full platform committee of ADA’s stand on “the single most important issue,” namely, “civil rights.” His statement read in part:

“We believe the Democratic Party must be unmistakably committed to a program of federal action which will result in the eradication of segregation and other forms of discrimination from all aspects of American life.

“Such a program would pledge that the next President, if he is a Democrat, will use the tremendous resources of his office to make desegregation a reality as quickly as possible. . . .

In particular, he urged the following measures:

1. Enact Title III to empower the Attorney General to file civil injunction suits in cases involving denial of civil rights.

2. Support the Supreme Court’s decree int he school desegregation cases and provide assistance for school districts prepared to desegregate.

3. Declare support for sit-in demonstrations.

4. Improve procedures in both Houses of Congress so that the will of the majority shall prevail and Congress will be a more responsive instrument of our national purposes.

5. Pledge vigorous enforcement of existing voting laws and enact additional legislation to protect the right to vote, including, if necessary, direct federal control and operation of registration and elections.

6. Promulgate an executive order forbidding segregation and other forms of discrimination based on race, religion or national origin in all federal or federally aided programs.

7. Enact a federal fair employment practices law to establish and enforce equal job opportunity in all employment in or affecting interstate commerce.

44. An inquiry conducted from 1962 to 1964 in one California school district showed similar pressures operating in high schools and even grade schools. Parents feared to protest, because those who did so found their children penalized with bad marks and loss of credits needed to graduate.

45. In 1950 former Attorney General Biddle had named the following Senators as members of ADA: Humphrey, Lehman, Graham, McMahon, Douglas, Murray and Neely, all Democrats. Lobbying Direct and Indirect, p. 30. (See Bibliography.) While the ADA Score Card shows a very much larger number of Senators and Congressmen now winning high marks by ADA standards, no official list of ADA members on Capitol Hill is available. Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, is a former State chairman of ADA and contributes to ADA World. Senators Pat McNamara and Philip Hart of Michigan regularly follow the ADA-UAW line.

46. Reports for 1957 listing “Contributions of $100 and over” and filed by ADA with the Clerk of the House of Representatives under the Corrupt Practices Act, show twelve labor unions contributing that year to ADA’s “Non-Political Account,” for a total of $47,677.

50. Title of a League for Industrial Democracy Round Table in which Congressman Jacob Javits participated in 1952 was: “Needed: A MORAL AWAKENING IN AMERICA.” Corruption in business and in politics was discussed; but corruption in labor unions was not mentioned. Others who took part in the program with Javits included: Walter Reuther, James B. Carey, John Haynes Holmes, Charles S. Zimmerman, Sidney Hook, Mark Starr, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Abraham Lefkowitz, Gus Tyler, Leland Olds, George Catlin, James Farmer, August Claessens, and Samuel H. Friedman, reading a statement from Norman Thomas, then in Japan. Nancy Adams, Chief Woman Officer of the British Trades Union Congress, expressed the appreciation of the British labor movement for Marshall Plan aid. Clarence Senior, alleged expert on Latin American affairs and long time member of the London Fabian Society, presided over the Round Table. Harry W. Laidler, Editor, Needed: A MORAL AWAKENING IN AMERICA. A Symposium (New York, League for Industrial Democracy Pamphlet, 1952). Samuel Friedman, National Vice Chairman and Executive member of the token Socialist Party, USA was listed in 1946 as one of our four delegates from the United States to the Council and Congress of the Socialist International in Brussels. Socialist International Information, Congress Issue (September 19, 1964), Vol. XIV, No. 20-21.

56. Mitchell’s opponent in the primary was Robert Morris, former counsel for the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. Observers reported that ILGWU workers and their associates, after assuring the defeat of Morris in the primary, failed to support Mitchell in the general election.

57. Lobbying, Direct and Indirect, p. 16. (See Bibliography.) Following is a fragment of pertinent testimony:

Mr. Brown: “Have you [ADA] become more active in the Republican Party recently, your organization?”

Mr. Biddle: “No–we have not, except–well in this sense. Our influence has been rather striking. I do not know if you have noted the organization of a similar movement in the Republican Party; I do not think they have a name for it–led by Russell Davenport.”

Mr. Brown: “You mean Republican Advance or something like that?

Mr. Biddle: “Something like that. I thought it might be called Republicans for Democratic Action, but that did not seem quite appropriate. . . .”

Chairman: “Did the national organization [ADA] actually take a position for Eisenhower for President?”

Mr. Loeb: “For Eisenhower or Justice [William O.] Douglas . . . The position taken at the Board meeting in Pittsburgh in April, 1948 was for Eisenhower or Douglas.”

Three times in the twentieth century, American Fabian Socialists on advice of their principals in London have formed a new leadership group to meet the challenge of a new era. In each case this occurred during a period of change and dislocation following a victorious war. Invariably, too, it was at a moment when agents of more direct revolutionary action had so outraged public opinion that the future of radicalism in America seemed threatened and a protective front of more or less untarnished respectability was needed.

Following the Spanish-American War and coincident with the 1905 revolution in Russia, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was founded upon the remnants of still earlier Fabian bodies. It was reorganized after World War I in the wake of various ill-starred Bolshevik intrigues, and became the League for Industrial Democracy, which supplied personnel and plans for the New Deal. Each leadership group in its day sparked a flurry of satellite organizations, committees and publications, longer or shorter lived as events might dictate. Thus the continuity and expansion of international Fabian Socialism under new names and fresh faces was assured, with the old goal of worldwide social revolution unchanged but unavowed. Psychologically, the process was adapted to what modern market research describes as the American taste for novelty, whether in the field of ideas or consumers’ goods.

Not long after World War II another key organization appeared, known as Americans for Democratic Action. It emerged out of the vapors and confusion that afflicted Socialist groups in the immediate postwar period. Directly descended from older Fabian Socialist elite bodies, ADA was more narrowly political in character than the ISS or LID, without actually being a political party. Just as a parasite vine can climb faster and higher by entwining itself around some previously rooted object, ADA would attach itself to one or both of the traditional political parties in the United States—with a view to imposing its program and its preferred candidates for national, state and local offices.

Like the original London Fabian Society, ADA’s limited size, modest budget and announced object of social reform for the voting masses offered no clue to the scope of its ambitions or the revolutionary nature of its long-range goals. Unlike the London Society, however, whose constitution states flatly that “the Fabian Society consists of Socialists,” Americans for Democratic Action has for reasons best known to itself usually chosen to deny its lineage and to disclaim its Socialist purpose.

Few contemporary Americans knew or cared that on January 3, 1947, a collection of men and women met at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., to set up what has properly been called a political action arm of the American Fabian Socialist movement. Though not a large crowd, its precise size is difficult even now to determine. Informed estimates vary from more than 400 to a founders’ list of 152 persons. (1) Nominally, they had responded to a “call” from the Union for Democratic Action to reorganize the “liberal” forces in the United States, at a time when the prestige of such forces was conceded to be at low ebb.

Since the day, almost two years before, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was laid to rest in the rose garden at Hyde Park, the political fortunes of the liberal Left had declined. Dazed New Deal Cabinet members and their aides relinquished their posts without a murmur. One by one, the wartime agencies with their wage-price-production controls, which left-wingers had hoped to retain as instruments of postwar policy, were folding. So-called liberals and progressives were being separated by the hundreds from the Federal payroll. Only the Department of State had succeeded in absorbing on a permanent basis any substantial number of the temporary wartime employees who could be relied upon to further assorted leftist aims.(2)

Access to the Presidential power, that made possible the attainment of so many Socialist schemes under Democratic Party auspices in the New Deal era, (3) was no longer a “liberal” perquisite. The new White House occupant, Harry S. Truman, was a product of Missouri’s Pendergast machine, which could claim closer ties with the underworld of organized crime than with the ideologists of organized labor’s Socialist wing. Henry Wallace—long the white hope of those Progressives who backed him instead of Truman for the Vice Presidential nomination in 1944–appeared to have thrown caution to the winds, aud was now reputed on good authority to be negotiating with U.S. Communist leaders to form a Third Party.(4)

The Cold War—a concept never fully accepted by Fabians—had replaced the starry-eyed wartime alliance with Soviet Russia and its agents in the United States. Slowly and painfully, the activities of Communists who had been employed indiscriminately since 1934 by Liberal-Democrat administrations in Washington were beginning to come to light. In June, 1945, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had arrested six persons associated with Amerasia, an obscure leftist periodical that maintained connecting offices in New York City with the then widely known and respected Institute of Pacific Relations. Incident to those arrests, the FBI recovered a staggering total of seventeen hundred top secret, secret and/or confidential documents relating to the Far East, all stolen from U.S. Government files.

In January, 1946, the defection of Igor Gouzenko, code clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, led to the discovery of other widespread Communist espionage in Canada and the United States, aimed at undermining America’s postwar control of atomic weapons. Failure of the Truman Administration to prosecute the Amerasia case convincingly, (5) or to act energetically on information conveyed by Canadian authorities, furnished a natural campaign issue for the Republicans, who won control of the Congress in November, 1946, for the first time in years. Sadly the left wing Nation proclaimed in an election postmortem: “Let us not fool ourselves in this hour of appraisal. The progressive forces in America have been routed.”

For the Nation and its friends, however, there was still comfort in the fact that a Fabian-dominated Labour Party Government held power in postwar England. Pledged to liquidate the Empire overseas and the private enterprise system at home, rulers of that new Socialist stronghold were engaged in nationalizing Britain’s basic industries and regimenting her traditionally independent people along welfare state lines, on the strength of a spurious campaign promise to “abolish poverty.” “Now American progressives, temporarily out of power, have much to learn from Britain,” wrote David C. Williams in the Fabian Journal, monthly organ of the London Fabian Society. “As issues such as Palestine move toward solution, there will be growing attention to England’s domestic programme and an increasing tendency to put English experience to use in America.” (6)

For the time being, the Labour Party Government’s lavish deficits were being underwritten by the United States. A multibillion dollar “reconstruction” loan to Britain, negotiated by the late lamented John Maynard Keynes, had been approved by a Democratic Congress in the spring of 194ff; but more aid would unquestionably be needed to keep British Fabian Socialists in office for an indefinite term. To assure sympathetic cooperation at the highest official levels, it was essential for American Fabian Socialists, temporarily in eclipse, to improve their own situation at the earliest possible date.

This necessity was emphasized by a visit from the Honourable Patrick Gordon Walker, Labour M.P. and special emissary of the Fabian International Bureau. Soon after the November elections in America, he was dispatched on a lecture tour of the Eastern United States by David C. Williams, then directing the London Bureau of the Union for Democratic Action. Avowed reason for Gordon Walker’s trip was to rally America’s liberal Left in support of the Socialist Government in Britain. (7) His arrival in January, 1947, was timed to synchronize with a conference at the Willard Hotel called by the Union for Democratic Action.

That two-day conference in the nation’s capital marked the birth of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Sometimes described as a New-Deal-in-exile, ADA’s primary aim irrespective of high-sounding declarations was to recapture for its supporters the power and influence that individual Socialists (according to Dr. Harry Laidler) had enjoyed under the New Deal. In a keynote speech delivered at the opening session of the conference, Governor Chester Bowles of Connecticut (8) urged the delegates by implication to disassociate themselves from past united front activities and to “organize a progressive front divorced from Communist influence.” After scoring “illusions about a Third Party,” he denounced Republicans and conservative Democrats with impartial fervor. “But the fact remains,” he concluded, “that we have no practical alternative. All our efforts, all our ingenuity must be thrown into the struggle to establish liberal [sic] control of the Democratic Party.”(9)

Next day at a caucus composed of the more influential delegates, it was agreed that the Union for Democratic Action, boasting at most ten thousand members throughout the country, would merge with a new organization to be called Americans for Democratic Action. Among those taking part in the caucus were Eleanor Roosevelt, Presidential widow; David Dubinsky of the AFL and Walter Reuther of the CIO; Joseph Rauh, Jr., Washington attorney, subsequently known as “Mr. ADA”; Marquis Childs, newspaper columnist and author of Sweden: The Middle Way, an apologia for Scandinavian Socialism. Predetermined conclusions reached by this policy-making group were reported back to the conference on the very same day by Eleanor Roosevelt, who also stressed the view that the handiest vehicle for immediate advancement of the new organization’s program was the Democratic Party. (10) A carefully pruned statement of ADA principles was released to the press by Barry gingham, editor and publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

To anyone schooled in the ways of American Fabian Socialism, operating behind a mask of liberal reformism and addicted to creating over the years new organizations with continuously interlocking memberships, the founders’ conference of ADA was merely a repetition of history. True, the Willard Hotel was a long way from the loft above Peck’s Restaurant, where founders of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society had met in response to a similar “call” more than forty years earlier. A larger number of the mid-century conferees could be classed as “opinion-formers,” having already achieved national prominence in their respective fields of politics, labor, education, religion and journalism; while others freely aspired to public office. Still there was an odor about the proceedings reminiscent of the old Fulton Street Fish Market district—although the sole surviving founder of the defunct Intercollegiate Socialist Society to attend was Dan Hoan, former Socialist Mayor of Milwaukee.

There was more visible evidence of kinship with the League for Industrial Democracy, successor to the ISS and still a going concern in its own right. In fact, the tie with LID was secured by a double knot. The Union for Democratic Action, which officially fathered ADA, had been launched on April 28, 1941, shortly after passage of the Lend-Lease Act and just before Hitler’s anticipated attack on Russia.l1 Formed to “help the Allies win the war,” it was summoned into being by a committee whose officers and members consisted almost to a man of seasoned LID “collaborators.” (12) A number of the selfsame individuals afterwards turned up as founders, officers and/or hard-core members of ADA. (13)

In his semi-official history of Americans for Democratic Action, an ADA Book Club selection in 1962, Professor Clifton Brock remarked by way of exculpation: “The UDA, ADA’s predecessor organization, was a splinter group spun off the Socialist Party. Very few UDA members remain in ADA today.” (14) The statement is both vague and misleading. In the first place, the announced aims of Union for Democratic Action and Americans for Democratic Action have never conflicted noticeably—as Brock’s use of the term “splinter group” would imply—with the aims of the little American Socialist Party or the larger Socialist International. Second, UDA disbanded when ADA was founded; but former UDA members joined the new organization en bloc, forming the nucleus of its day-to-day activities until age or political office made it preferable for them to retire to the sidelines. Moreover, ADA—in common with the London Fabian Society—has never laid undue stress on formal membership, once an identity of ideas and aims has been established.

At least three former UDA activists were to sene for years as rotating officials of ADA. These were: James Loeb, Jr., called the “organizing genius of UDA”; James Wechsler, editor-columnist of the New York Post, a confessed former Communist who embraced the Middle Way; and Joseph Rauh, Jr., termed the “lodestar” of ADA, who in his zeal for civil liberties has consistently served as counsel for individuals suspected of giving aid and comfort to Communists, from William Remington to Sidney Lens. (15)

These three—Loeb, Weschler and Rauh—are sometimes said to have been the “real founders” of ADA, which is not literally true. They could more accurately be described as expendables and frontrunners of Americans for Democratic Action—a semi-secret political society whose membership lists have never been made public and whose alleged sympathizers frequently seem as effective in its behalf as any dues-paying member. All three were present at the ADA’s founding conference. James Loeb, Jr. (16) was promptly named secretary-treasurer of a national organizing committee, jointly headed by Leon Henderson, former director of the Office of Price Administration, and Wilson Wyatt, former housing expediter, who became campaign manager for Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

The converging bloodlines of ADA were exemplified in the person of Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, presiding at the Willard Hotel conference. He was not only national chairman of the Union for Democratic Action; but also former president of LID New York chapter and a seemingly permanent member of the LID national board of directors. Leading theologian of the liberal Left, (17) Dr. Niebuhr’s doctrines like his politics were “progressive.” Originally an advocate of the “Social Gospel,” he had progressed by 1934 to a doctrine which he styled “Christian Radicalism.”

At that point—as his young friend and co-founder of ADA, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has noted—Niebuhr rejected the Sermon on the Mount for pragmatism, even declaring that the choice between violence and nonviolence in social change was purely a matter of expediency. (18) In his Reflections on the End of an Era, published in 1934, Niebuhr saw “the sickness of capitalism” as something organic, rooted in its very nature and “in the private ownership of the productive ,process.” He declared Marxism—which by definition is godless—to be an essentially correct theory and analysis of the economic realities of modern society” and predicted “the end of capitalism will be bloody rather than peaceful.” (19)

By 1944, when he delivered the West Foundation lectures at Stanford University, Dr. Niebuhr had progressed far enough to perceive the expediency of the Keynesian approach. Published the following years as The Children of Light and the Children of Dark ness ( a book Senator Robert Kennedy would take with him to the moon!), that lecture series was a plea for the “mixed economy’ and the “open society” according to the gospel of John Maynard Keynes.(20) In 1947, as a top figure in UDA, Niebuhr professed himself a “pragmatic liberal,” opposed to every dogma and dedicated to gradual, piecemeal social reform, very much as the early British Fabian Socialists had contrived to represent themselves to the public. That was the image, above all others, which ADA hoped to convey to the American people.

An outsider, witnessing those deliberations at the Willard Hotel that spawned the ADA, might easily have supposed he had wandered into some anniversary function of the League for Industrial Democracy. So many of the old familiar faces were there! The usual blue chip speakers and greeters at annual LID conferences and dinners— with the exception of such proclaimed Socialists as Norman Thomas or Harry Laidler—were in evidence on the platform and the floor.

Eleanor Roosevelt, who was to receive an LID award in 1953 as “First Woman of the World,” was free at last to proclaim her organizational ties with the liberal Left. She was accompanied by her son, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., who as a Congressman would roll up a 100 per cent voting score in favor of ADA-approved bills, and who was to become Under Secretary of Commerce in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. In Eleanor Roosevelt’s entourage were her ever-controversial proteges, Joseph P. Lash and Aubrey Williams. Lash has been listed as an early LID collaborator. Williams, an editor of the Southern Farmer and deeply involved in the budding “civil rights” movement, was to serve on the national committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, (21) a League for Industrial Democracy affiliate.

Such veteran LID “collaborators” as Senators Herbert Lehman, Richard Neuberger and Frank Graham, sometime president of the University of North Carolina, were prominently on hand, along with senators-to-be Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas. Also present was Congressman Andrew Biemiller, another old regular of the League, later to serve as a congressional lobbyist for the united AFL-CIO. David Dubinsky of the ILGWU, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, James Carey of the Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers and other left wing union chieftains cited as stable collaborators of LID, attended in person, flanked by their lawyers and lieutenants. Directly or indirectly, they offered the electoral and financial backing of Socialist-led unions grown to giant size in World War II. (22)

Editors and journalists long true to LID hastened to place their skills at the disposal of ADA. They included Robert Bendiner of The Nation; William Bohn, an old Socialist warrior of the “80 per cent Socialist” New Leader; Monroe Sweetland of the Molalla, Oregon Pioneer, afterwards on the campaign staff of Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy; and, of course, James Wechsler of the New York Post. Other old LID-ers were columnist Edgar Ansell Mowrer and long time Soviet apologist Louis Fischer. Ironically enough, two newcomers better known for their social graces than Socialist leanings, the brothers Joseph and Stewart Alsop, headed the alphabetical list of ADA charter members.

At its inception, Americans for Democratic Action appeared to be little more than a body of self-anointed political leaders in search of a following, and a program in search of a party. Convinced that no third party could win practical power in the United States, ADA’s initial task was to detach misguided progressives from the third party movement then being organized by Henry Wallace with the backing of American Communists. For the moment, what Professor Brock cynically calls “the utility of enemies on the Left” was doubly clear to ADA. By disassociating itself openly from domestic Communist Party leaders servile to Moscow (and subject, in any case, to being removed without notice), ADA insured its own respectability, as well as its ability to shield the more vulnerable elements of the Left in time of peril.

Apparently, ADA was the American version of that mysterious Third Force, often referred to by postwar European Socialists. The term was first used in Austrian Social Democratic newspapers, and given currency in the late nineteen-forties by the French Socialist leader, Leon Blum, to denote the end of the Popular Front. Deprecating Communist Party tactics on the one hand, and decrying conservatives as reactionary-fascist on the other, ADA sought to impose its own formula for achieving social change, via a series of New Deal-type “reforms,” as the only reasonable alternative.

Toward the Soviet Union proper, ADA’s attitude was marked by the same patience and helpfulness (though, naturally, “a little bit criticizing”) (23) which always distinguished the London Fabian Society. Indeed, the original ADA program asserted: “We firmly believe in breaking out of the vicious circle of mutual distrust between ourselves and Russia. We favor a policy based on an understanding of the legitimate [sic] aspirations of the Soviet Union.”

The function of this reborn organization was not solely to regain power and influence for its members and sympathizers, nor simply to repeat the experience of the New Deal. It was also to develop and speed new applications of the Keynesian method for a peaceful transition to Socialism, in terms of the postwar era. Momentarily, economists of the Keynesian school (represented at the ADA founders’ meeting by Dr. Boris Shishkin of the ILGWU and LID, and Dr. J. Kenneth Galbraith of Fortune Magazine and Harvard University) were somewhat embarrassed. The big American depression they predicted so confidently would follow World War II had somehow failed to materialize. How could all-out deficit spending be justified, in a robust and expanding economy?

As things turned out, there was little need for philosophic justification. Even so frivolous a bit of Keynesian propaganda as Galbraith’s book, The Affluent Society, proved largely superfluous, except as a morale builder for Keynesian professors. The utility of government spending as a lever for winning elections was already apparent to practical Democratic leaders and to legislators-of both national parties—the more so, when pointed up by ADA-stimulated pressures from trade unions, minority groups and liberal intellectuals. One project after another for permanent Federal spending programs in the fields of housing, health, nutrition, education and general “welfare” would be concocted by ADA or its allies, and presented by its chosen legislators. Defeated in one session of Congress, such bills would be revived with variations in the next.

Increased government authority over bank credit and bank reserves would be urged. “Goals” in housing, health, education and related fields were to be set by administrative planners. “Full employment,” keystone of the whole Keynesian economic structure, must be accepted as a responsibility of the Federal Government, with planning, supervision and controls over private employment implied but not stated. Government financing, and if necessary, government plants must be used to “provide more power, more steel and other vitally necessary raw materials.” Finally, would arise, during an election year, the Area Redevelopment Administration Program. All these steps would be proposed successively in ADA platforms, and urged again and again on the Congress and the Executive, until accepted in whole or in part. Each would lead the country another step closer to total welfare state control, and expand the “public sector” of the economy as opposed to the “private sector.”

Something new, however, was to be added in the new era: namely, uninhibited government spending in the international field. Means would be devised to transform the Marshall Plan—supposedly designed for temporary postwar reconstruction and eagerly supported by ADA—into a permanent, large-scale program of foreign assistance, direct and indirect. Even military spending at home and abroad would not be discouraged, providing the ultimate decisions were dictated by ADA-approved State Department officials. Until such time as international control of atomic energy (advocated in the original 1947 ADA program, and never abandoned) had been achieved, the threat of nuclear destruction could always be raised to generate that atmosphere of perpetual crisis needed to justify Keynesian spending policies. Membership cards of ADA announced its devotion to “freedom and security for all people everywhere”(24)–presumably at the expense of the United States.

It is hard to believe a handful of people, meeting privately at the Willard Hotel in 1947, could have contrived to spark so many of the measures which in less than twenty years have propelled the United States so far and so fast along the freeway to International Socialism. In fact, it might seem incredible, except for the undisguised evidence of what an even smaller group of Fabian Socialists—through penetration and permeation, through research, propaganda and persistence— has done to make a shambles of the former British Empire.

2.

Possibly because he was in England when the reorganization (25) took place, a key instigator and ever-faithful servant of Americans for Democratic Action was not included on its founders’ list. He was David C. Williams, wartime representative in London of American trade unions and director of the London Bureau of the Union for Democratic Action Educational Fund. Concerning him, an editorial note in the Fabian Journal for March, 1947, (p. 7) stated authoritatively: “David C. Williams . . . is a member of the Fabian Society and of the St. Marylebone Local Fabian Society.”

Recalling that normal procedure in the Fabian Society has always been “join for one year, join for fifty,” there is no reason to suppose the foregoing statement is outdated—although the formalities of membership are not infrequently waived for individuals engaged in delicate overseas missions. David C. Williams, in particular, has been notable for his unswerving devotion to the cause of Fabian Socialism, by whatever name it might be called.

As ADA’s Director of Research and Education (26) and as long time editor of the ADA World, he has had a major responsibility for transmitting and expounding the Fabian policy-line on selected issues to ADA supporters. For almost twenty years, indifferent to wealth or worldly success, this quiet American has served as an efficient, durable and self-effacing link between Americans for Democratic Action and its Socialist blood brothers in Britain.

Williams was an Ohioan by birth and a citizen of the world by choice. Son and namesake of a Unitarian clergyman who once headed the Intercollegiate Socialist Society’s student chapter at Marietta College, (27) he qualifies as a second generation Fabian Socialist. Perhaps the most decisive fact in his life was that he went as an American Rhodes Scholar to Oxford, graduating in 1935. There he encountered a left wing political group operating on a scale then undreamed-of in the United States. For the first time, he saw labor politics practiced in public style by a student elite and was exposed to adult masterminds of a movement that was destined to provide him with a career.

It was a decade when Fabian influence, frustrated at the government level in Great Britain, rose to commanding heights in the universities. At Oxford G. D. H. Cole was “the great gazebo,” while at Cambridge John Maynard Keynes personally taught his exciting new theory. The Left Wing political tradition, however, was more pronounced and more continuous at Oxford. (28) Many an American student less predisposed than Williams found the allure of Fabian tutors and companions overwhelming, and never recovered from that early infatuation.

University Fabian Societies transformed into Labour Clubs (29) flourished almost beyond belief. The Oxford Labour Club in the thirties, for instance, boasted a thousand members and functioned virtually as a separate college within the university. It organized its own classes and lecture courses under its own touted professors and tutors, among them confirmed Fabian Socialists like G. D. H. Cole, A. D. Lindsay, Sir Arthur Salter and R. H. S. Crossman. (30) When the club held public meetings on questions of the day, it drew student audiences of two or three thousand. The speakers were such well-publicized personalities as Professor Harold Laski, John Strachey, Harold Nicolson, Herbert Morrison, Sir Stafford Cripps, all ranking members of the London Fabian Society. (31) Even the American Negro baritone, Paul Robeson, then attracting overflow audiences in London, gave a free concert at Oxford for the Labour Club.

Political theory was enlivened by some practical experience in politics, which involved organizing workers in nearby factory towns, sending delegations to Parliament and picketing the Ministries. Besides serving as a seed bed for future Fabian statesmen and civil servants, the Labour Club was also an agitational branch of the British Labour Party. Oxford students, transported to London by the busload, lent color and verve to mass demonstrations against the Government—a pattern now being commonly repeated in other countries around the world, sometimes with Communist assistance. More than one American joined the fun, although for visitors participation in British politics was strictly illegal. In 1938, Howard K. Smith—afterwards a foreign correspondent and television news analyst—became the first American Rhodes Scholar to head the Oxford Labour Club. (32)

British club members automatically held membership in the British Labour Party. Regardless of nationality, young Fabians of the inner circle that steered the Labour Club were elected as undergraduates into the parent London Fabian Society, according to a practice established since the turn of the century.(33) With reference to Americans, the process appears to have moved into high gear during the nineteen-thirties—the decade of the Great- Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the coming to power of Adolf Hitler. Not only the potential rulers of England, (34) but potential rulers of the United States as well, were to be groomed under Fabian supervision.

This was no mild academic joke; but a serious, long-range intention, pursued with patience and finesse, and backed by all the well-placed contacts at home and abroad that the Fabian Society could assemble. Young hopefuls tapped hr future prominence usually rose with astonishing celerity in their chosen careers. They were the predestined recipients of fellowships, research grants, literary prizes and other awards, as well as choice posts in government and the professions. Since the Association of Rhodes Scholars made corresponding efforts on behalf of its members, in the long run the results were doubly gratifying.

Thus one finds Rhodes Scholars of the nineteen-thirties serving in the nineteen-sixties as senior officials or consultants in a number of Federal departments in Washington. Some have been in government service for years; others are retreads and/or recent appointees. A few are in position to wield great influence, and through their access to the White House itself, to be instrumental in promoting policies advocated by British Fabians—notably in the fields of international, military, disarmament and monetary policy.

Meanwhile, Britons who were once their contemporaries in the Oxford Labour Club have risen to leadership in the Labour Party, and speak with authority in the councils of the Socialist International. A conspicuous example is Harold Wilson, Parliamentary Leader of the British Labour Party and Vice Chairman of the Socialist International, who was a student and Fellow at Oxford in the nineteen-thirties. In a memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy—”one of the numerous tributes paid to . . . [him] by Socialists throughout the world” (35)–Wilson said: “I know a good number of his associates; some of them I have known for many years.”(36)

At least one effect of such long-standing camaraderie must be noted, which vitally affects the security and defense capabilities of the United States. On July 24, 1963, Harold Wilson attended a meeting of the Bureau of the Socialist International at Congress House in London. There a resolution was adopted concerning the Moscow Three-Power Conference on nuclear tests, which declared in part:

“The Bureau of the Socialist International welcomes the prospect of an agreement ending nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and under water …. The Bureau hopes that this limited agreement will pave the way to an agreement covering all nuclear tests. The Bureau pays tribute to the efforts of Mr. Harold Wilson who during his recent conversations with Mr. Krushchev suggested this limited agreement as the most fruitful means to achieve early progress.”(37)

Soon afterwards—despite a sober warning from General Curtis LeMay, then U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff—the United States Congress was persuaded to ratify the test ban agreement suggested to Khrushchev by that noted nonmilitary expert, Harold Wilson, and endorsed by the Socialist International. At a time when civilian planners in the Pentagon looked primarily to atomic missiles for the future defense of America, the pact prevented the United States from testing the efficiency of nuclear warheads on missiles still unproved! Some leading proponents of the test ban in administration circles were Secretary of State Dean Rusk (Oxford, 1934) and Walt Whitman Rostow (Oxford, 1937-38). Thus the old school tie, in shades of pink to red, spans the Atlantic.

How many American Rhodes Scholars have been enrolled in the London Fabian Society over the years, it would be difficult to say. No statistics on the subject have been released. The identity of such recruits has been closely guarded, apparently to avoid embarrassing those who hold or hope to hold positions of influence in their native land. Moreover, this particular type of recruitment might be construed by jurists as violating the intent of the Rhodes Trust, which, however singular, was anything but Socialist.

Cecil Rhodes, under whose last will the Trust was created, (38) had been an impassioned English patriot and the most rugged of individualists. He looked forward secretly to a time when the United States would rejoin Great Britain, in a world federation of states steered from London. Superficially, his plans for international government, and for giving “young colonists” a political bias along with an Oxford education, might be said to resemble the Fabian Society’s. Fundamentally, however, his purpose was diametrically opposed to that of Sidney Webb’s select company.

Above all, Lord Rhodes was dedicated to the perpetuation and extension along classic capitalist lines of the British Empire, which Fabians schemed to dissolve. Obviously, he never intended that his fortune amassed in the gold fields and diamond mines of South Africa be used to train young Americans in Fabian Socialism; or to promote peaceful social revolution, under a cloak of learning and Old World culture, in a lost colony of the British Empire.

Of two thousand or more American Rhodes Scholars invited to Oxford since the Trust was formed, by no means did all succumb to the power of Fabian suggestion. There were men among them immune to Socialist blandishments, several of whom have found their careers in government abruptly terminated. Such patriotic and ill-rewarded Americans include Bryton Barron, former head of the State Department’s Treaty Section, and Elvis J. Stahr, Jr., Secretary of the Army during the Kennedy-Johnson Administration, who resigned in protest against the “muzzling of the military.”

There was also Stanley K. Hornbeck, Chief of the State Department’s division for Far Eastern Affairs in the nineteen-thirties and political adviser on the Far East, who was dragooned, apparently in all innocence, into serving as a character witness for Alger Hiss.(39) Hornbeck was one of those who attempted without success to stem a tide in the conduct of United States foreign affairs, which in the middle forties delivered mainland China to Communist rule. As late as 1950, he made a valiant though futile effort to warn his successor, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, against chat perilous policy which covertly protected and preserved the Chinese Communists.(40)

Presidential appointments of 1961-64, however, gave extraordinary prominence to American Oxonians of the same vintage as David C. Williams and Howard K. Smith, apparently holding mutually congenial views.(41) Among them were a Secretary of State; a Supreme Court Justice; several Under Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries and senior planners in areas directly concerned with formulating diplomatic, monetary, defense and disarmament policy for the United States. Even the Director of the Budget, Dr. Kermit Gordon—who states that “growth” is the answer to deficits(42)–was one of them.

Based on an analysis of their writings, speeches and official acts, the collective opinions of those officials on basic issues can be rather simply tabulated:

Economics: post-Keynesian, that is, the greater the deficit, the greater the national growth; developed nations must expend their substance for the benefit of under-developed nations, on a government to government basis.

Welfare State: responsibility of the Federal Government to provide financial aid from tax monies to an ever-growing number of private citizens and institutions; pilot programs in medicare, public housing, rent subsidies, urban renewal, job training, aid to education, research and depressed areas, to be expanded year by year; more centralized control, as a result of Federal aid to states and municipalities; social security system to be used as a basis for collecting computerized Federal dossiers on the entire population.

Foreign Affairs: relaxation at any price of “tensions” with the Soviet Union; eventual admission of Red China and East Germany to the United Nations; economic aid “without strings” to satellite and neutralist nations, and subsidized “trade” with Soviet Russia.

Defense: long-range planning by civilian officials, in collaboration with the State Department; disregard of professional military advice, and downgrading of nonpolitical officers; elimination of “first strike” weapons, as designated by the Soviet Union; gradual obsolescence of the Strategic Air Force and various strategic weapons, through cessation of production and new development.

Disarmament: gradual, to reassure the American public; progressive, to reassure the Soviet Union; ultimately total, to assure “peace under World Law” and a World Police Force.

World Government: to be achieved as rapidly as possible through the United Nations, via ”modernization” of the United States Constitution.

Implicit in all this but not openly stated, is the socialization of the United States through new forms of ownership and control of production, which must precede the application of any overall world plan.

Nearly all in the group are college professors who have served intermittently in government since World War II. In the years between, more than one has enjoyed the bounty of the great tax free research and educational foundations, where policy for government agencies and private institutions is often framed at the research stage. They include a former president of the Rockefeller Foundation; a former director of the Ford Foundation’s economic and administrative program; and a former large-scale beneficiary of the Carnegie Foundation, Dr. Walt Whitman Rostow. All appear to have been well-schooled in post-Keynesian economics and a world outlook that tends to subordinate traditional interests of the United States to other considerations.

If, as the record would indicate, they have been affected since their student days at Oxford by Fabian Socialist ideas, they might be expected to render signal service to Americans for Democratic Action, whose international program closely parallels that of the Fabian Society. A sheltered and protected group of non-expendables, those old Oxonians in the New Frontier seemed to have had little or no official contact with ADA—a possible exception being Assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland, former publisher of The Reporter. (43) Like Harold Wilson, however, they can claim to have “known a good number” of its more eminent members and associates for years.(44) Several staunch supporters and/or founding members of ADA— Chester Bowles, G. Mennen Williams, J. Kenneth Galbraith, and W. Averell Harriman—have served with the group, sometimes in equally high government posts; but have apparently been expected to follow, not formulate official policy.

First and foremost in that Oxford group was Dr. Dean Rusk, named Secretary of State in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. Placid, plump and singularly gifted at avoiding the public eye or the appearance of being personally responsible for controversial decisions, his record merits examination. During the middle nineteen-forties, he succeeded to the same Political Affairs and Postwar Planning posts in the State Department previously held by Alger Hiss—according to that peculiar sequence whereby a respectable crypto-Socialist often replaces an exposed Communist in administrative Washington. (45) Rusk was a member of the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, to which some highly reputable individuals and business firms with interests in the Far East innocently subscribed. Institute publications and propaganda are credited with having fostered those official United States policies which favored the Chinese Communists, deplored by Stanley Hornbeck and other concerned Americans.

Subsequently, the Institute of Pacific Relations was discovered by U.S. Government investigators to have been infiltrated by agents of Red Army Intelligence.(46) Yet Dean Rusk, a State Department official, still recommended Institute publications for use by the Chief of U.S. Military Intelligence. (47) Even in 1950, five years after the Amerasia case, he strongly supported the Institute’s request for Ford and Rockefeller Foundation grants.(48)

That year, as Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Rusk delivered a memorable speech comparing the Chinese Reds to the American patriots of 1776. It was viewed in diplomatic circles as a prelude to recognition of Red China, contemplated by the State Department in 1950. Such action had already been taken by the Fabian-controlled British Labour Party Government of 1945-51, and was being urged in this country by ADA. The move was disrupted by the Communist invasion of South Korea, which the State Department accidentally invited through a widely circulated memorandum (evidently prepared in Dean Rusk’s division) declaring Korea to be “outside the defense perimeter of the United States.”

Dean Rusk demonstrated the same lenient attitude towards Communist troublemakers so characteristic of Fabian Socialists, as well as the classic Socialist function of opening the door to Communist conquest. During the Korean War he was instrumental in launching the fatal “No Win” policy, which persists to the present day. As President Harry S. Truman revealed in his Memoirs, it was Dean Rusk who took the first visible step towards establishing the principle of the “privileged sanctuary” in Manchuria, by agreement with Fabian Socialists then in control of the British Government at all levels.(49)

In a posthumously published interview with Bob Considine of the Hearst Newspapers,(50) General Douglas MacArthur stated he submitted a plan for victory that would have ended the Korean War in less than two weeks and eliminated Red China as a present or future military threat. Author of twenty victorious campaigns and conceded by experts to be one of the ablest military strategists of the century, General MacArthur was prevented by Fabian Socialist influence in our own State Department from putting his master plan into effect.

The reason alleged for the prohibition was that a clear-cut victory for American forces in the Far East might have touched off World War III. Owing to Soviet Russia’s very limited nuclear and logistic capabilities at that date, “fears” of a world holocaust conjured up by the State Department are now recognized to have been unfounded—as they have been on every subsequent occasion, thanks to the vastly superior power of American deterrents. This was no less true in the more recent Cuban crisis than it was during the Korean War: the function of deterrents being, after all, to deter! As lately as April, 1964, General Thomas S. Power flatly declared that as long as the Strategic Air Force is maintained at peak efficiency and the Russians know it, “there is no danger of a nuclear war.”(51)

The truth was that in 1950 Socialists everywhere—in America, in England and in the United Nations—displayed a quiet determination to protect and preserve Red China, whatever the cost in American or British casualties—just as Socialists of an earlier generation had moved in 1920 to preserve Soviet Russia. For the prolonged bloodletting in Korea and the final humiliating stalemate that so greatly damaged the American position in the Far East, Dean Rusk shared the responsibility to a degree not generally realized.

It hardly mattered that in 1952, when the damage had been done, Rusk delivered a verbal attack on the Red Chinese Government and spoke respectfully of Chiang Kai-shek; nor that he was chided for doing so by the British Fabian Socialist, Michael Lindsay, in a letter to the New Statesman.(52) This type of interplay only served to provide protective coloring for Dr. Rusk and to insure his availability for future service at a still higher official level.

As Secretary of State in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration, Dr. Rusk revived and enforced the principle of the privileged sanctuary in Southeast Asia. True, he talked bravely of victory in Vietnam. Yet at a cost of some 5 million dollars per day in United States economic and military aid, the jungle war in Vietnam was allowed to continue year after year under restrictions that made victory impossible. Once again the pretext was raised by the State Department (and echoed in the syndicated columns of such court favorites as Walter Lippmann, Marquis Childs, and Joseph Alsop) that the type of military action required to win in Southeast Asia would involve us in war with Red China—a war which that stricken country was neither economically nor militarily prepared to wager The fact is, that with Fabian-schooled officials and advisers dictating our foreign and military policies, the United States has not been and never will be permitted to win a clear-cut military or diplomatic victory over Socialist/Communist forces.

As in Chungking long before, demands were made for instant social and political “reforms” in war torn Vietnam. Once again pressures were applied by the State Department, and seconded by docile aides in the Pentagon. Inevitably they led to the overthrow and death of President Ngo Dinh Diem, who—whatever his alleged shortcomings from the viewpoint of Western Democracy—gave every appearance of being a sincere patriot and devout anti-Communist. It was not the first time that assassination had been condoned by Rusk’s State Department. With the same alacrity that they moved to recognize the killers of Diem, Dean Rusk and his subordinates hastened to extend diplomatic recognition to the transient administration of President Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, following the murder of General Rafael Trujillo. Eighteen million dollars in United States economic aid were rushed at record speed to Juan Bosch, whose accession was hailed in a congratulatory message from the Socialist International.(53)

Perhaps Rusk’s smoothest service to the cause of Fabian Socialism was his participation in the Skybolt incident of 1963. Out of a clear blue sky his junior partner, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, canceled production of the Skybolt missile, leaving the British Royal Air Force without a promised nuclear deterrent. This action was taken contrary to the advice of professional United States military experts. Unceremoniously announced to former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at Bermuda, it was described at the time as the harshest blow inflicted in years on Britain’s ruling Conservative Party. Similar action had previously provoked the fall of a Canadian Government, and the return to power of a Left liberal Premier known for his sympathy toward Socialist programs.

Some theorized that a more indirect result of l’affaire Skybolt was to convince General Charles de Gaulle of France that American pledges of atomic aid were unreliable and that he might just as well go it alone. Others theorize that de Gaulle has had a more sinister purpose all along. The impression that United States nuclear assistance was a Sword of Damocles, rigged for its effect on internal politics in allied nations, did not improve the position of the United States in world diplomacy—a consideration of little moment to British Fabian Socialists, who were not concerned to preserve global confidence in the United States. Immediately after the Skybolt Conference so shocking to Prime Minister Macmillan, Opposition Leader Harold Wilson paid an unofficial but quietly triumphant visit to Washington, where he was greeted by men he had “known for years” as the presumptive Prime Minister of Britain.

While it was apparently Rusk’s function to execute Fabian Socialist International policy at the uppermost level, the chief advance agent of such policy seemed for some years past to have been Dr. Walt Whitman Rostow. The so-called Millikan-Rostow Report was the fruit of a study conducted under his supervision at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies. Published in 1957 as A Proposal: Key to An Effective Foreign Policy, (54) it foreshadowed what actually became United States foreign policy in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. In The Stages of Economic Growth (55) which appeared in 1960, Rostow sketched the first dim outlines of a worldwide New Deal to be supported by the United States along Keynesian lines.

Appointed deputy adviser to President Kennedy on national security matters, Rostow had a major voice in the preparation of a secret 286 page report on Basic National Security. Following a Moscow meeting in 1960 with Deputy Foreign Minister Kuznetsov, Rostow advised that the United States should abandon offensive or “first-strike” weapons, distasteful to the Soviet Union.(56) Notably, the B-70 bomber—deemed essential by the Strategic Air Command for our future safety, but canceled by the Kenned-Johnson Administration. By the same token, the Navy was denied permission to construct a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and was restricted to building an obsolescent type vessel.

Moving to the State Department, as counselor and as chairman of its Policy Planning Council, Dr. Rostow continued to predict the shape of things to come. Reading his articles that appeared with remarkable frequency in the weekly Department of State Bulletin, the more perceptive division chiefs and foreign service officers could divine the attitudes they were expected to assume. In the February 17, 1964 issue, for example, Rostow launched a brand new slogan obviously designed to serve as a guideline for foreign policy: Freedom and Diversity! It was particularized in the March 16th issue of the same publication by Secretary Rusk, himself, in an article entitled “Why We Treat Different Communist Countries Differently.”(57)

In an address to a group of business executives reprinted in the Department Bulletin of February 3, 1964, Rostow explained that the species of world-wide New Deal envisioned for underdeveloped countries will not wholly eliminate private business. While United States aid to those nations may give their governments control over the more basic forms of capital outlay, he pointed out kindly that such developments will create new mass markets for consumers’ goods and simple agricultural tools, from which private manufacturers can benefit—at least for a while.

Prudently, Dr. Rostow refrained in that official publication from announcing the ultimate goal which he had already defined in other published works. Incredible as it might seem to most Americans, he actually looked forward to a day when the United States as a sovereign nation would cease to exist. If the question is raised as to where or how he might have acquired such ideas, it must be remembered that he, too, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford during the crucial nineteen-thirties.

In a somewhat unexpected fashion Walt Whitman Rostow fulfilled the desire expressed in Lord Rhodes’ last will, to create in American students “an attachment to the country from which they sprang.” Rostow’s parents, as it happened, came from Russia. The fact that they named his elder brother, Eugene Victor Rostow, after the American Socialist Party leader, Eugene Victor Debs, leaves little doubt as to their political inclinations. Walt Whitman Rostow attended ancient Balliol, and can claim the distinction once ascribed to Lord Curzon:

“. . . Of course, I went to Balliol College

And what I know not, is not knowledge.”

Balliol was likewise the college of G. D. H. Cole, a mere tutor in Economics but an important wheel in the New Fabian Research apparatus, already recognized as performing the Society’s most important function. Always eager to bring “new blood” into the movement, Cole and his wife invited students of radical tendencies to their Holywell home for weekly rounds of Socialist discussion.(58) A number of British Fabians, who became prominent in public life during the forties and after, were regular guests throughout their student years at the Coles’ Monday evenings; as were some Americans who discarded the Socialist label under advisement.

Inevitably, Soviet Russia was a recurrent topic of discussion. Though admittedly not quite perfect, the Socialist Fatherland was regarded with affection and hope. Some collegians (like Howard K. Smith) even spent vacations in Moscow. No matter what the provocation, somehow those Fabian acolytes never lost hope of inducing Soviet leaders to alter their ways. The same schoolboy conviction, that Soviet Russia can eventually be persuaded to change its internal power structure and abandon its aim of world domination, suffuses the statements and positions of Walt Whitman Rostow; and in part through him, was incorporated into the foreign policy of the United States.

Rostow returned to England during World War II as a youthful Army Major attached to the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. In London he worked closely with various exiled Socialist leaders from Nazi-occupied countries, who had gathered under the sheltering wing of the Fabian International Bureau—and who hoped to assume power in their native lands at war’s end. For his mysterious services, Major Rostow was awarded the Military Order of the British Empire, presumably through the good offices of Fabian Socialists in the Cabinet. Though just eight years out of college, he was invited in 1946-47 to lecture as Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford. In 1949-50 he was called to Cambridge University as Pitt Professor of American History.

During the two years that intervened between his teaching sessions at Oxford and Cambridge, Walt Whitman Rostow worked in Geneva as assistant to Dr. Gunnar Myrdal, then executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Myrdal was a Socialist and former Minister of Commerce in Sweden, who all but succeeded in wrecking his country’s postwar economy. As wartime economic adviser to the Swedish Embassy in Washington, he had fallen under the spell of those American Keynesians who were certain the United States would suffer an even more severe depression after the Second World War than after the first.

Believing Sweden must hedge against the predicted world slump, Dr. Myrdal and his associates applied a number of inflationary Keynesian measures. These included cheap money and expansion of credit at home and raising the value of the krone abroad. Looking to Communist Russia for new trade opportunities, Myrdal personally engineered a billion krona (280 million dollar) trade agreement with the Soviet Union. The Swedish Government agreed to underwrite five-year credits in that amount to the Russians, who could buy directly from the manufacturers—an arrangement in some respects similar to the 19B4 Soviet wheat deal with the United States.(59)

Although Sweden emerged from World War II in a very prosperous condition, the remedies prescribed by Dr. Myrdal had reduced the country, by 1948, to appealing for Marshall Plan aid. Meanwhile, Myrdal himself retired in style to Geneva, where he proceeded undisturbed to recommend economic policy for all of Europe. Fortunately, perhaps, his advice was not taken too seriously.

The reverence which Dr. Myrdal still inspires among Left liberals in the United States and England derives from a monumental fifteen hundred page work published in 1944, An American Dilemma. Despite his unconcealed Socialist affiliations, he was chosen by the tax free Carnegie Foundation to direct a $250,000 study of race relations in the southern United States. Since Sweden had never known a Negro problem, it was presumed Dr. Myrdal would be “unprejudiced.” In his report, however, he acknowledged a debt to W. E. B. Dubois, a founder of the NAACP and an early promoter of Pan-Africanism.(60) Myrdal’s repeated emphasis on the alleged tendencies to violence and disrespect for law, which he found innate in the American character, appears to have inspired, in some measure, the forms of later “civil rights” agitation in the United States.

By 1947, this massive and costly volume was already in its ninth edition. Used by NAACP lawyers, it furnished the so-called sociological background for the United States Supreme Court’s school integration decision of 1954. Incidentally, it also contained some highly disparaging remarks about the United States Constitution. Referring to the “nearly fetichistic cult of the Constitution,” Dr. Myrdal asserted that “the 150-year old Constitution is in many respects impractical and ill-suited for modern conditions …. Modern historical studies reveal that the Constitutional Convention was nearly a plot against the common people. Until recently the Constitution has been used to block the popular will.”(61)

This was the man with whom Walt Whitman Rostow worked harmoniously for two years at Geneva—so much so, that on returning to England in 1949, he left his brother, Eugene Victor Rostow, to act as Myrdal’s assistant. Eugene Victor Rostow, who later became Dean of the Yale University Law School, was reported in mid-1964 to be under consideration for an opening on the Circuit Court of Appeals in Connecticut as a preliminary to his eventual appointment to the United States Supreme Court.

Former students, who attended Dr. Walt Whitman Rostow’s lectures in England and/or later in the United States, claim that his approach to American history is strictly geopolitical. Father of the alleged science of geopolitics was the British geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder, friend of early British Fabians at the University of London. Mackinder developed the theory of a pivot or “Heartland” area deep in Eurasia, and assigned a lesser role to all lands outside it. Since it stresses the relationship between physical geography and national behavior, geopolitics has aroused some interest among military strategists, armchair and otherwise.(62) Based on a materialistic view of history, it has stirred the enthusiasm of both Socialist and national Socialist planners—and was utilized by military intelligence experts of the Black Reichswehr, notably Major General Ernst Haushofer, in drafting Adolf Hitler’s blueprint for world conquest.

Adopting geopolitical jargon, Walt Whitman Rostow described America as a mere continental island off the greater landmass of Eurasia, comprising Europe, Asia and Africa. He explained the growth of the United States to greatness as being due to no inherent virtue in its own economic and constitutional system; but solely to divisions among Eurasian power blocs, which permitted such a circumstance to occur. By converse reasoning, a future union of Eurasian power blocs could either succeed in conquering the United States outright, or in forcing America’s absorption into a globe-girdling federation of Socialist states, under a centrally controlled police force and planned economic system.(63)

Such absorption represents the Fabian Socialist plan for peaceful world revolution. It is demonstrated by the visible attempt, on one hand, to encircle the United States with a swiftly growing block of Socialist-ruled nations; and on the other, by an attempt to procure a permanent economic and political accommodation between the United States and Soviet Russia. This far-flung plan presupposes eventual world rule by an intellectual Socialist elite backed by the mass electoral power of a worldwide Socialist Labor Confederation, whose docility will be guaranteed through the device of full, state-assured employment. For more than a decade, Dr. Walt Whitman Rostow appears to have been its veiled prophet in the United States.

Couched, like the theory of Keynes, in bland, semi-technical language designed to mystify the uninitiate, the overall plan is revealed by signs to an illumined few. With some effort, however, its outlines can be discerned by any normally intelligent layman who takes the trouble to read the voluminous and cloudy writings of Walt Whitman Rostow—just as the military intentions of Adolf Hitler might have been evident from 1922 to anyone perusing the equally cryptic works of Major General Ernst Haushofer.(64) Neither Rostow nor Haushofer will ever be read for their pleasure-giving quality. Both convey the impression of talking over the reader’s head to a special audience. Since it takes talent of a rare order, however, to remain totally unintelligible for hundreds of pages, there is always, somewhere, a moment of truth.

In Rostow’s book An American Policy in Asia, for example, after a long, tortuous and frequently obscure argument, it finally becomes clear that Rostow advises granting Red China a seat in the United Nations, as well as diplomatic recognition by the United States. During the same year when this work appeared, The New York Times of October 2, l955 reported:

“A social scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has undertaken to develop a new portrait of the United States in a world setting. Under the three year grant from the Carnegie Foundation of New York, Dr. Walt W. Rostow, a Professor of Economic History, is directing the study …. Dr. Rostow’s project will examine our role in what he calls the ‘foreign policy revolution.’”

Similar collective labor brought forth still another book over the signature of Walt Whitman Rostow, The United States in the World Arena. After attributing the remarkable development of the United States during 150 years to back the more recent strides of the USSR to phenomenal ability, he wrote: “Now brutally and directly and in every dimension, the nation is caught up in a world where its military power, diplomatic influence and ideological conformation are explicitly, relentlessly under challenge from the Soviet Union.” (65) The answer? America must “change its national style,” while retaining its “operational vigor”–and even then success cannot be assured! “Will the United States,” asks Rostow, “mobilize the strength, will and imagination to bring about the process of persuasion in the Communist bloc which, by denying all other alternatives, would permit without major war the gradual evolution and release of the forces for good in it?” (66)

The real break in the clouds, however, “so central to the author’s judgments that it appears worthwhile to state it explicitly,”(67) was reserved for the Appendix:

“. . . the urgent imperative to tame military force and the need to deal with peoples everywhere on the basis of an accelerating proximity argue strongly for movement in the direction of federalized world organization under effective international law. And, should effective international control of military power be achieved, it might prove convenient and rational to pass other functions upward from unilateral determination to an organized arena of international politics.”(68)

Or, put in another way, says Rostow:

“It is a legitimate American national objective to see removed from the United States the right to use substantial military force to pursue their own interests. Since this residual right is the root of national sovereignty and the basis for the existence of an international arena of power, it is therefore an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined.”(69)

An end to nationhood will be achieved, said Rostow, when “the great conference has ended and the freely moving inspectors take up their initial posts from one end of the world to the other and the nightmare passes.” (70) In a contrary vein, it may be pertinent to recall the laconic words of an old-style American who did not live to see the “No Win” policies in Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. “The United States,” remarked Will Rogers, “never lost a war or won a conference!”

The “judgments” of Walt Whitman Rostow are not personal to him, nor confined to the close-knit group of high-salaried professors in government who enjoyed the benefits of an Oxford education in the same era as he. As previously noted, an official declaration approved by the Congress of the Socialist International at Oslo in 1962 stated plainly, “The ultimate objective of the parties of the Socialist International is nothing less than world government …. Membership of the United Nations must be made universal, so that all nations, including China, may be represented by their governments in power.” (71)

The United States in the World Arena was published in 1960, and its contents (or at least, its conclusions) should have been a matter of public knowledge. Yet Walt Whitman Rostow was appointed only a few months later to an advisory post in the White House itself, and thereafter to a strategic position in the Department of State. With the great wealth of able, well-educated, and patriotic citizens available and willing to serve their country in an official capacity, how does it happen that out of 170 million Americans a man was chosen who pursues objectives common to those of the Socialist International? One thing is certain: it did not happen by accident. A domestic political group able to deliver a substantial bloc of votes and a domestic lobby of substantial weight in Washington were required to assure the predominance of such officials in the Kennedy-Johnson and Johnson-Humphrey Administrations. Both requirements were met by Americans for Democratic Action, political arm of the Fabian Socialist movement in the United States.

Footnotes

1. William E. Bohn, veteran American Socialist who was there, estimated the crowd at “a couple of hundred.” New Leader (April 15, 1957), p. 9.

Clifton Brock, a sympathetic historian, states it numbered “more than 400.” Clifton Brock, Americans For Democratic Action: Its Role in National Affairs. Introduction by Max Lerner (Washington, Public Affairs Press, 1962), p. 51.

Appearing before a House Committee in 1950, former Attorney General Francis Biddle, then national chairman of ADA, agreed to submit a founders’ list of 350 names, as of January 7-9, 1947. This list, when submitted and published in the record of the Hearings, contained exactly 152 names. Lobbying, Direct and Indirect. Part 6 of Hearings before the House Select Committee on Lobby Activities, House of Representatives, 81st Congress, Second Session (Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office, House Document 66193, 1950), “Americans for Democratic Action,” July 11, 12, 1950, pp. 19-23.

2. Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments, pp. 26-29. (See Bibliography.) Testimony of J. Anthony Panuch, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, concerning the absorption in large numbers of “un-screened personnel” by the Department of State at the close of World War II. “I would say,” stated Mr. Panuch (p. 29), “that the biggest single thing that contributed to the infiltration of the State Department was the merger of 1945. The effects of that are still being felt, in my judgment.

3. Harry W. Laidler, Socialism in the United States (New York, League for Industrial Democracy, 1952), p. 16. “Then came the New Deal legislation,” wrote Dr. Laidler. “Roosevelt and his followers adopted immediate demand after immediate demand from the platform of the Socialist Party . . . in the light of these developments many labor progressives and radicals swung their support from the Socialist Party to the New Deal. The socialist movement found itself in the curious position of having collectively and through individual Socialists, greater influence in molding legislation than ever before, while finding it increasingly difficult to obtain a large membership and following as a party.”

4. Brock, op. cit., p. 72.

5. Among six persons arrested, only three were indicted. Of those three, one pleaded guilty and was fined $2,500; another entered a plea of nolo contendere and was fined $500; Justice Department attorneys dropped an airtight case against the third. Overwhelming evidence obtained by the FBI was suppressed. As recently as 1962–according to the Department of State’s Biographic Register for 1961-62–one of the six, John Stewart Service, was serving as U. S. Consul in Liverpool, England. He has since been honorably retired on Government pension. . . . Hearings held by a House Committee in 1946, confirming the guilt of all six persons arrested, were withheld from publication for four years. They were finally printed in the Congressional Record, Vol. 96, Part 6, 81st Congress, Second Session (May 22, 1950), pp. 7428 ff.

8. More recently Under Secretary of State and Ambassador to India in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration.

9. Brock, op. cit., p. 51.

10. The New York Times (January 5, 1947).

11. The date for Hitler’s invasion of Russia was originally set for May 15, 1941. It was postponed six weeks, until June 22, apparently as a result of General William Donovan’s trip to Yugoslavia undertaken at the request of Britain’s Secret Service chief in the United States, William Stephenson. These facts were known at the time to top U. S. as well as Russian officials.

H. Montgomery Hyde, Room 303 (New York, Dell Publishing Co., 1964), (43print), p. 62. An authorized account of British Secret Service in the United States during World War II. Previously published in 1962 by Farrar, Straus and Co., and published in England under the title, The Quiet Canadian.

All but one of the above-named officers, and a majority of the committee members appear on the official list of League for Industrial Democracy “collaborators” and student chapter-heads, published by Mina Weisenberg. (See Appendix II.)

13. See Appendix V for official list of ADA founders.

14. Brock, op. cit., p. 216.

15. William Remington, wartime U. S. Department of Commerce official, was convicted of perjury for denying Communist Party connections and for denying he had given information to a Communist espionage agent. His counsel was Joseph Rauh, Jr.

Sidney Lens–sometime director of United Service Employees Union Local 329, AFL-CIO, whose name appears on the masthead of many latter-day Socialist publications–was questioned on February 15 1963 by the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security regarding alleged connections with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee; as well as with Communist-sponsored organizations cited at the time on the Attorney General’s list. To most of the questions, he pleaded lapse of memory. Asked if he had ever belonged to a Trotskyist organization, he took the Fifth Amendment. His attorney was Joseph Rauh, Jr.

16. James Loeb, Jr., publisher of a small newspaper in upstate New York, later served briefly as Ambassador to Peru in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. He was recalled at the request of Peruvian authorities, for alleged interference in that country’s national elections, and has since been sent as Ambassador to Guinea.

17. Other socially conscious clerics who attended the Willard Hotel Conference and are inscribed as ADA founders were: Rt. Rev. William Scarlett, Episcopal Bishop of St. Louis; Dr. A. Powell Davies, pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church, Washington, D.C.; Rabbi Milton Steinberg of the Park Avenue Synagogue, New York City; Reverend (now Monsignor) George Higgins of the Social Action Committee of the National Catholic Welfare Conference; Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, retiring president of the Federal Council of Churches. (See Appendix V.)

18. Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social and Political Thought. A Symposium. Edited by Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretell (New York, The Macmillan Co., 1956), p. 135.

19. Ibid., p. 137.

20. As far back as 1926, Keynes had written: “The next move is with the head, and fists must wait.” John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Biography (New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1933), p. 91.

21. See Appendix IV. As of 1964, Aubrey Williams was also national chairman of the Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee.

22. In 1961 the three–the UAW, the UEW and ILGWU–were announced to be among the ten wealthiest labor unions in the United States, according to a list made available for the first time by the U. S. Department of Labor. Ranking second and third in annual income were the Electrical Workers and the Auto Workers, with annual incomes of $62,273,000 and $50,668,000, respectively. Fifth on the list was the ILGWU, with an annual income of $21,702,000. . .. United Steelworkers of America, which topped them all with an income in excess of $65,000,000 was also represented at the ADA founders’ conference; but withdrew its support a few years later because of alleged ADA radicalism.

23. Hearings of the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, pp. 44-45. Statement of Colonel Igor Bogo lepov.

24. Italics added, then removed.

25. Fabian Journal, monthly organ of the Fabian Society, duly noted the formation of ADA. A footnote in its March, 1947 issue (p. 10), referring to the Union for Democratic Action, stated: “Recently reorganized under the title ‘Americans for Democratic Action’ it includes as officers and members many persons prominent in the New Deal, and in trade union and progressive organizations.”

26. In the Fabian International Review, to which David C. Williams contributed an article on the 1956 national elections in the United States, the following item appeared in a column headed “Our Contributors”: “David C. Williams is Director of Research and Education, Americans for Democratic Action.” Fabian International Review, No. 12 (September, 1956), p. 15.

In an editorial box on page 3, the same issue of the same publication stated: “Fabian International Review was launched in January 1953 to provide a serious socialist commentary of world events. Since then it has appeared every four months. It is with regret, therefore, that we announce this as our last issue.

“We have tried to maintain a good all-round quality and to contribute usefully to discussion among socialists. . . .

“The Fabian International Bureau will continue, of course, to publish pamphlets.”

29. By 1924 all University Fabian Societies had become Labour Clubs, according to the Fabian Society Annual Report, 1924-25, p. 8.

30. Howard K. Smith, Last Train from Berlin (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), pp. 34-38. Though he could hardly have been unaware of the fact, Smith failed to mention that the teachers and speakers whom he named were all well-known Fabian Socialists.

31. Ibid., pp. 34-38.

32. Ibid., p. 38. ADA World for February, 1964, reporting Howard K. Smith’s participation at a local ADA function, boasted he would be in charge of news coverage and analysis at the national party conventions for a nationwide TV network in 1964.

33. Edward R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (London, A. C. Fifield, 1916), p. 103. “In 1895,” wrote Pease, “a University Fabian Society was formed at Oxford by and for undergraduates, but maintaining continuity by the assistance of older members in permanent residence, such as Sidney Ball at St. John’s. In 1900 there were four Fabian Societies at Oxford, Glasgow, Aberystwyth and Cambridge, and their members were always elected at once into the parent society in order that the connection may not be broken when they leave the University.”

38. Originals of seven wills written by Lord Rhodes between 1877 and 1899 may be found at Rhodes House at Oxford. The first five dealt with a worldwide secret society to promote the British Empire. The sixth, dated 1895, provided scholarships for “yong collegians.” The final will, drawn in 1899 and made public in 1902 after Rhodes’ death, offered scholarships to American collegians.

Rhodes trustees simultaneously took steps to form the secret society proposed by the old empire-builder. On July 24, 1902 the Pilgrims Society of Great Britain was founded, and six months later on January 13, 1903 the Pilgrims Society of the United States was organized. Thomas W. Lamont, Sr. was at one time chairman of the executive committee of the American Pilgrims.

39. Alger Hiss, long a trusted and high-ranking State Department official, was identified as having been a secret member of a Communist cell and as having given confidential Government documents to agents of Soviet Intelligence. He was convicted of perjury and sentenced to prison.

40. In a letter of June 7, 1950, Stanley Hornbeck wrote to Dean Rusk: “It was the year 1945–and not before then–that the Government of the Untied States, first having taken action inconsistent with tradition and commitment in regard to China, embarked upon what became a course of intervention in regard to the civil conflict between the National Government and the Communists, in China . . . then and thereafter . . . the Government of the Untied States brought to bear pressures, pressures upon the National Government which were not against the Communists but were on their behalf.” The Institute of Pacific Relations. Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws, of the Committee of the Judiciary, 82nd and 83rd Congress (Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office, 19521-52), p. 5363.

41. A few of the former Rhodes Scholars appointed to high office during the Kennedy-Johnson Administration are:

Dean Rusk (Oxford, 1934), Secretary of State; sometime professor of Government at Mills College, and former president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

George C. McGhee (Oxford, 1937; University of London, 1937), Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs; once coordinator of the 400 million dollar aid program to Greece and Turkey.

Robert V. Roosa (Oxford, 1938-39), Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs; a Keynesian economist who has taught at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Harlan Cleveland (Oxford, 1938), Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, former chief of UNRRA’s mission to China; former director of ECA’s China program; former publisher of The Reporter, a “progressive” monthly.

Charles J. Hitch (Oxford, 1934), Assistant Secretary of Defense and Comptroller; wrote The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age, known as “the Bible” of Pentagon civilians.

Kermit Gordon (Oxford, 1938-39), director of the Bureau of the Budget, previously on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers; Harvard professor of the Keynesian School; former director of the economic and administrative program of the Ford Foundation.

Walt Whitman Rostow (Oxford, 1936-38), counselor of the State Department and chairman of the Policy Planning Council; former deputy to the President’s Special Assistant on National Security; former staff member, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

43. Harlan Cleveland, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, formerly published The Reporter, a progressive monthly that normally followed the ADA line and to which ADA members often contributed. Editor of The Reporter, Max Ascoli, and his wife, the former Marion Rosenwald Stern, appeared for years on official ADA lists, as substantial and regular fund donors.

44. For example, see, the list of persons whose “generous assistance” is acknowledged by Walt Whitman Rostow in the Preface to his book, The United States in the World Arena (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. xiii.

45. Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs, Robert V. Roosa was appointed to a post comparable to that held by the late Harry Dexter White.

46. In this connection a letter of February 13, 1934 from Edward C. Carter, director of the Institute, to Selsker H. Gunn of the Rockefeller Foundation may be of incidental interest: “. . . I don’t think I told you that, when we saw Karakhan (then Assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs) in Moscow in 1931, he told us that the Institute’s researches in China and Japan would be equally valuable whether the Far East remained capitalist or became communist.” Institute of Pacific Relations. Hearings, p. 5120.

47. Ibid., p. 2870. A letter confirming this statement was introduced into the record, but not printed.

48. Ibid., pp. 5023; 5026. A letter of September 16, 1950 (p. 5026) from William L. Holland, secretary-treasurer of the Institute to Dean Rusk stated: “May I make an urgent and probably irregular appeal to you to lend your weightiest support to the double IPR financial appeal which is to be considered by the Rockefeller Foundation on September 22. . . . Your words of support for us to the Ford Foundation were very influential, even though action on that grant has been postponed pending the forthcoming appointment of a director for the foundation.”

49. On November 6, 1950, Red Chinese troops and supplies were streaming into Korea, and Russian-built planes based in Manchuria were harassing American troops. MacArthur had ordered U. S. bombers to strike at the Yalu River bridges. A few hours before the American bombers were due to take off from their Japanese bases, an emergency meeting was called at the White House, attended by President Truman, Secretary of State Acheson, Secretary of Defense Lovett and Assistant Secretary of State Rusk. Regarding that meeting, President Truman wrote: “Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk pointed out that we had a commitment with the British not to take action which might involve attacks on the Manchurian side of the river without consultation with them. He also told Mr. Lovett that the State Department had presented MacArthur’s report on Chinese Communist intervention to the United Nations and that an urgent meeting of the Security Council had been requested. At this meeting we would try to get a resolution adopted calling on the Chinese Communists to cease their activities in Korea. . . . Mr. Rusk also mentioned the danger of involving the Soviets especially in the light of the mutual assistance treaty between Moscow and Peiping. . . . Then Lovett called the Air Force Secretary, Mr. Finletter (a staunch ADA man–ed.) and instructed him to tell the Joint Chiefs what Mr. Rusk had set forth and to tell them that he [Lovett] and Acheson both felt that this action should be postponed until they were able to get a decision from me.”

Next day some strictly limited action along the Yalu River was authorized; but the principle of the privileged sanctuary had been established. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs (Garden City, Doubleday & Co., 1956), Vol. II, p. 374.

51. From a speech delivered in Palm Springs, California by General Tomas S. Power, then commanding the Strategic Air Force. The Daily-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif., April 18, 1964).

52. A letter of 1952 from Michael Lindsay to the New Statesman and Nation stated: “Mr. Rusk’s recent assertions that the Chinese Government was a Russian colonial regime and that the Kuomintang really represented the Chinese people have been widely criticized.” Institute of Pacific Relations, Hearings (See Bibliography), p. 5391.

57. “Within the Soviet block,” wrote Secretary Rusk hopefully, “the Stalinist terror has been radically changed. And within the Soviet Union, as well as most of the smaller European nations, there are signs–small but varied and persistent signs–of yearnings for more individual freedom. And there are practical reasons why men must be allowed freedom if they are to achieve their best.” Department of State Bulletin (March 16 1964), p. 393.

Cf. Richard Loewenthal, “Freedom and Communism,” Socialist International Information (August 1, 1964), Vol. XIV, No. 16-17. This article by Loewenthal of the London Fabian Society and the German Social Democratic Party originally appeared as a supplement to Berliner Stimme early in 1964 and reflects the official foreign policy line of the Socialist International. Views expressed by Rusk and Rostow are similar.

58. Cole, op. cit., pp. 208-209.

59. The budget of Sweden’s Socialist Government for 1964-65 included a 768 million dollar military appropriation, although little Sweden is traditionally a neutral nation. Informed observers have suggested Sweden’s military forces anticipate assuming a key role in the world-police functions of the United Nations.

60. Gunnar Myrdal (with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose), An American Dilemma (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1944), (1483 pages), p. 601. (On July 6, 1966 Dr. Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference received from the Swedish Consul General in New York a check for $100,000 which had been collected in Sweden for the benefit of his organization. Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1966).

61. Ibid., pp. 12-13.

62. As originally presented in 1904, Mackinder’s theory seemed designed as a warning to the British Secret Service to block Czarist Russia’s expansion in Asia. In modern times the same theory has been gratefully adopted by Soviet Russia to justify its own plan for world conquest. Rostow’s geopolitical approach can therefore be interpreted as an indirect concession to Soviet Russia.

It is interesting to note that an article on geopolitics by the U. S. Department of State’s official geographer contains the following pronouncement: “Whether we view Mackinder’s theory as fact or fancy, the whole American concept of containment is bound up with his Heartland theory presented before the Royal Geographical Society 60 years ago.” G. Etzel Pearly, “Geopolitics and Foreign Relations,” Department of State Bulletin (March 2, 1964), p. 321.

63. W. W. Rostow, The United States in the World Arena (New York, Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 543-544.

64. In 1940-41 the author of Fabian Freeway had the painful experience of reading the collected works of General Haushofer at the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C.

65. Rostow, op. cit., p. 537.

66. Ibid., p. 535.

67. Ibid., p. 543.

68. Ibid., p. 549.

69. Ibid., p. 549.

70. Ibid., p. 540-550.

71. The World Today: The Socialist Perspective. A Socialist International Publication. (London, no date), p. 11.

There was another secret weapon valued more highly than the atom bomb by Anglo-American Fabians of the New Deal era. Namely, the university professor, who, as the British Fabian Socialist philosopher, John Atkinson Hobson, had suggested was to be the future secret weapon of national strategy. A familiar of Justice Louis D. Brandeis and of the latter’s protégée, Felix Frankfurter, Hobson merely pointed up a trend that had been gaining momentum in America since the turn of the century. With the Roosevelt Administration, the liberal-to-Left professor moved into his prescribed orbit as the planner and guide of national policies based on Fabian research, which officials and politicians would trigger.

A trio of university professors played a major part in shaping the seemingly impromptu social, fiscal, legal and diplomatic strategy of the Roosevelt Administration and other Democrat administrations to follow. Two were British nationals, closely identified with the Fabian Society of London. The third was an American citizen of European origin who had helped to found organizations in this country known to be affiliates of the (Fabian Socialist) League for Industrial Democracy, (1) and who had been rebuked by former President Theodore Roosevelt, for his radical bias, as displayed in a government report.

All three were equally at home in the lecture halls of England and the United States; and though they held forth in many localities, all left a particular imprint on Harvard University. They were brilliant conversationalists, tireless letter writers and mental gymnasts of the first order, with a talent for gaining the ear of important persons and a calculated appeal to youth that has caused their influence to outlast their times. Their names were Felix Frankfurter, Harold J. Laski and John Maynard Keynes.

It has been admitted by New Deal insiders that FDR privately agreed, more than a year before becoming President, to sponsor the Tennessee Valley Authority project; the Agricultural Adjustment, Public Works and Conservation programs; Securities Exchange and Holding Company control; and something resembling the National Recovery Act.(2) He had also agreed to sponsor a system of social insurance leading to the welfare state. (3) If no hint of those intentions appeared in the Democratic Party platform of 1932, only the public was surprised by the rapid-fire developments following Roosevelt’s accession to power. The original brain trusters, who trailed him from Albany to Washington, knew what to expect. Their immediate problem was to discover ways of writing the new program of encroaching Socialism into law.

For that purpose it seemed natural to turn to Felix Frankfurter, Byrnes Professor of Law at Harvard University, whose specialty was administrative law. Preeminent among FDR brain trusters, he was a tiny figure of a man, with a large head and keen, dark eyes behind gleaming spectacles. Endowed with exceptional brainpower and adroitness, he had championed many Socialist-approved causes at the intellectual level without ever descending into the pit of Socialist Party politics.

Born in Vienna, Felix was brought to New York City by his parents at the age of twelve, speaking only German and Hungarian. By the time he was nineteen he had mastered the English language and graduated third in his class from the City College of New York. In 1906 he took his law degree at Harvard University, tutoring less talented students to help pay expenses. That was the year when the Intercollegiate Socialist Society founded a club at Harvard, with Walter Lippmann as president. According to Lippmann’s biographer, in 1909 Frankfurter often joined the club members for happy, discursive weekends at the Chestnut Hill home of Dr. Ralph Albertson, a leading Christian Socialist of the day. (4) Characteristically, Felix Frankfurter was never named as having been a member of the club in anniversary speeches and publications of the LID.

Only a few years later, however, he was intimately associated with Walter Lippmann as a co-founder of the New Republic —the liberal weekly designed as an American opposite number of the British Fabian Socialist New Statesman. In that capacity, Frankfurter made the acquaintance of the chief stockholder of the New Republic, Dorothy Whitney Straight, who married Leonard K. Elmhirst and moved to England in 1925. As Mrs. Elmhirst, she helped to endow a Fabian Socialist-sponsored front organization in England called Political and Economic Planning or PEP, which was organized as a “charitable trust” in 1931 and helped to devise plans for the New Deal in advance of FDR’s election.

Between 1916 and 1922 Frankfurter filed briefs in several important cases involving hours of labor and minimum wages. He gave legal advice in the famous Scopes trial defended by the Socialist attorney, Clarence Darrow; in the 1926 case of the Patterson, New Jersey silk mill strikers; and in the still more controversial Sacco and Vanzetti appeals of 1927. Frankfurter used, advocated and taught the technique initiated by Justice Louis D. Brandeis before the latter’s ascension to the Supreme Court. Known as the Brandeis Brief, it involved amassing a volume of factual, historical and/or pseudo-philosophic material and presenting it with the shortest possible legal argument. Prudently, Frankfurter disclaimed any strict adherence to Brandeis’ sociological approach to the Law, leaving that reputation to his colleague and bosom friend, Dean Roscoe Pound of Harvard Law School.

Instead, he professed a deep concern for procedural regularity, a difficult point with which to take issue. By invoking the Olympian names of Brandeis and Holmes as often as possible and discoursing in the loftiest philosophic vein, he almost succeeded in diverting attention from his own radical associations and purposes. Yet, as late as 1930, Frankfurter wrote that through the use of due process the justices could read their own economic and social views into the neutral language of the Constitution. (5) As a Supreme Court Justice, he was to lean heavily on the same due process clause precisely because of its flexibility, proclaiming it “the most majestic concept in our whole constitutional system.” (6)

Although he lacked practical experience in drafting legislation, for years Frankfurter had advised his students to familiarize themselves with the legislative process. With their assistance he duly became the legal progenitor of the New Deal. At FDR’s request, Frankfurter supplied his own handpicked former students for every key legal post in the new Administration so that he controlled, in effect, both the writing and interpretation of the new legislative measures. It almost seemed as if he had been preparing for such a contingency ever since his appointment to the Harvard Law faculty in 1914, and when the moment came, he was ready.

Believing that the past is prologue and that changes in juristic concepts must be initiated through the law schools, Frankfurter had always selected his pupils with care. His classes, according to the Harvard University catalogue, were “open only to students of high standing with the consent of the instructor.” The most promising were invited on Sunday evenings to the Frankfurter cottage on Brattle Street for extracurricular discussions on law and life. For the chosen few, Frankfurter’s supervision went far beyond the classroom and into their future careers.

Each year two honor graduates of Harvard Law School had been assigned, largely on Frankfurter’s recommendation, as secretaries to the liberal Supreme Court Justices, Louis D. Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1933, at least eight of those erstwhile prodigies quickly became prominent in the New Deal Administration. Brandeis’ former secretaries included Dean G. Acheson, who served briefly as Roosevelt’s Under Secretary of the Treasury and at Frankfurter’s urging was later installed in the State Department; James M. Landis, Federal Trade Commissioner and co-author, with Benjamin V. Cohen, Thomas G. Corcoran and Frankfurter himself, of the Securities and Exchange Act; William Sutherland, counsel to the Tennessee Valley Authority; and Paul Freund, a lawyer in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, who returned to teach at Harvard. Holmes’ former secretaries accounted for Thomas G. Corcoran of the RFC; Lloyd Landau and Donald Hiss of the Public Works Administration; and Alger Hiss of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, who went on to the State Department, the Carnegie Foundation—and ultimate disgrace. All were Frankfurter’s “boys.”

When the Tennessee Valley Authority was set up and needed an executive who was also a clever lawyer, Frankfurter produced David Lilienthal, whom he had previously placed with Wisconsin’s utilities control commission in training for just such a job.(7) To Agriculture, Frankfurter sent the aggressively liberal Jerome L. Frank; to Interior, he sent Nathan R. Margold; and to Labor, he sent Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., more recently a trustee of the Ford Foundation and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In those days it was said— apparently with good reason—that no New Deal department nor agency would hire a lawyer unless he was on Frankfurter’s “White List.”

The professor’s influence, however, was not limited to supervising legislation and selecting legal personnel. He was consulted on every major administrative move and Presidential statement. For some six or eight months after Roosevelt took office, Frankfurter commuted each week to Washington from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The White House door was regularly open to him, and no official doors were closed. Within the first “hundred days” most of the basic New Deal legislation had been written and passed—a task that would clearly have been impossible in so short a time if not partially mapped out in advance.

With America’s first Socialist-inspired government program staffed and operating, Frankfurter left to spend a year as visiting professor at Oxford University in 1933-3~an invitation conveniently arranged by Fabian admirers in England. His parting words to exuberant New Dealers reflected the mood of the Fabian tortoise. “Go slowly,” he warned, “go slowly.” In particular, Frankfurter advised delaying as long as possible a Court test of the National Recovery Act, whose constitutionality he doubted. This was strange advice from a man whose own highest ambition was to sit on the Supreme Court, and on any grounds of principle the advice seems hard to justify.(8)

By a telltale coincidence, Frankfurter’s words were echoed before the year was out by a minor British financier, Israel M. Sieff, long regarded as one of the Fabian Society’s more able permeators. On May 3, 1934, Congressman Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania told the U.S. House of Representatives that a certain Israel Moses Sieff of London, England had recently declared in a public speech: “Let us go slowly for a while, until we can see how our plan works out in America.”(9) Sieff belonged to the British organization, Political and Economic Planning or PEP, and the plan to which he referred was the New Deal. Why on earth, the Congressman wondered, should a British national living in London refer to the New Deal as “our plan”? Unintentionally, Sieff had revealed a relationship between Fabian Socialist planners in England and in the United States.

Political and Economic Planning (PEP), of which Sieff was a founder, sponsored social, industrial and political “studies,” apparently with a view to influencing official action as well as “opinion-forming” groups. Some of its findings were eventually published and some were not. Its method of work, which has never varied, was described in a prospectus, About P.E.P., distributed in 1956 by the organization itself:

“The method of work is to bring together as a group a number of people who are concerned professionally with one or another aspect of the problem under discussion, as well as a few non-specialists who can ask the fundamental questions which sometimes escape the experts. This technique enables P.E.P. to bring to bear on a problem the combined experience of men and women working in different spheres including business, politics, the Government and local authority services, and the universities. The groups are assisted by a paid research stat, who act as their secretaries and drafters. The names of those who form the groups are not disclosed and the results of their work are published on the authority of the organisation as a whole. This rule was adopted deliberately from the first and has proved of great value. It enables people to serve who would not otherwise be able to d-o so; it ensures that members can contribute freely to discussion without being bound by the official views of any body with which they may be identified ….”

“For the convenience of working members, a club was also formed in 1931 with rooms im the building at Queen Anne’s Gate. The P.E.P. Trust and the P.E.P. Club are separate institutions, although there is naturally a large common membership…. As regards the subjects for study, the Council of Management tries to pick those which seem likely to have reached the forefront of public discussion at about the time when the work has been completed and the findings published …. The aim throughout has been to maintain a balanced programme of social, industrial and general economic studies, chiefly in order that the work of particular groups may be guided by an understanding of national needs and resources as a whole.

“. . . income is derived in roughly equal proportions from donations (given mainly by firms in industry and commerce); subscriptions to the broadsheets; grants from educational foundations. Many of the donations are made under covenant, thus enabling P.E.P. to claim refund of income tax paid by the donors.” (10)

The rule of secrecy, governing the activities of PEP from the start, not only concealed its sources of inspiration, but allowed American planners to participate without attracting any special notice. It also made possible an exchange of ideas and personnel with the New Fabian Research Bureau, which was organized at about the same time. Prominent members of the organization over the years have included Sir Julian Huxley, Israel Sieff, E. M. Nicholson, Kenneth Lindsay, Thomas Jones, Jack Pritchard, A. D. K. Owen, Richard Bailey, J. B. Priestley—all identified more or less intimately with the Fabian Society, which by its own definition “consists of Socialists.”

One of PEP’s first and most faithful donors was the American-born Dorothy Elmhirst, whose British spouse was to serve from 1939 to 1953 as director of the organization. At her Devonshire estate, Dorothy Elmhirst welcomed Professor Felix Frankfurter, who had visited her on Long Island with Herbert Croly during the formative days of the New Republic. Frankfurter was greeted no less warmly in 1933-1934 by his roommate of World War I years in Washington, Lord Eustace Percy, as well as by old friends at the New Statesman, the London School of Economics and the New Fabian Research Bureau. All exemplified for Frankfurter “those civilized standards of English-speaking people” which he was so eager to apply in America.

Political and Economic Planning was evidently conceived as a polite transmission belt for ideas and plans originating in the New Fabian Research Bureau. That is not to say its membership or donors’ lists were 100 per cent Fabian. On the contrary, a number of honestly liberal or conservative business firms and individuals were persuaded, at one time or another, to lend their names and to contribute funds to PEP projects. Whether they hoped to improve their own public image or were merely seeking information, they were charmed by the urbane manner, discreet privacy and studious pretensions of Political and Economic Planning. While their presence lent weight to PEP pronouncements, such persons still remained outsiders. They had little to do with selecting the subjects for survey, and no voice in the conclusions reached. For all practical purposes, the internal operations of the group were controlled by the Management Council and the permanent, paid office staff.

Political and Economic Planning was one of the earliest Fabian Socialist front organizations to employ the device of bringing together business men, public officials and professional intellectuals for planning and propaganda purposes. A forerunner of that mixed society which was to effect a “humane” transition to Socialism, the organization served the Fabians as an instrument of peaceful permeation and penetration, both in government and private industry. Its initial object was to secure coordination between Socialist planners in the United States and the United Kingdom, leaving emulation on an Empire-wide scale to come later.

A PEP document issued in 1931, under the title Freedom and Planning, had recommended setting up National Councils in Agriculture, Transport and Coal Mining—resembling the industry-wide councils afterwards set up in the United States under the National Recovery Act. The manufacturer was to be regulated through national planning. Waste in distribution was to be eliminated through a system of department and grocery store chains. The individual farmer would be told just what and how much he could plant. Large tracts of land were to be acquired by the Government, and publicly-owned electric power plants were to be administered by a government utilities trust. It was such recommendations, contained in PEP’s Freedom and Planning, that obviously emboldened Israel M. Sieff to refer to the New Deal as “our plan.”

Both in form and method of work, Political and Economic Planning was a pilot organization. Aside from the influence it boasted of exerting on the architects of the New Deal, the organization also became the model for a whole series of similar and related organizations in this country which by now have acquired almost mystic prestige. Some of the group’s present-day American offshoots specialize in economic and social studies; some in foreign affairs; some in world government schemes. All aim to affect national policy and to shape public opinion, while remaining immune from public control.

An immediate American counterpart of PEP was the National Planning Association, quietly reorganized m 1934 after Felix Frankfurter’s return to the United States. The new organization was reputedly financed by grace of Dorothy Elmhirst. It included New Deal officials, trade union leaders, business men and publicists, with a solid core of League for Industrial Democracy regulars. (11) Israel M. Sieff kept in touch during frequent trips to America. Sometimes he was accompanied by Leonard K. Elmhirst long time chairman of PEP. (12) A lineal descendant of both PEP and the National Planning Association is the Committee for Economic Development founded in 1941.

The National Recovery Act was duly declared unconstitutional in 1935 by unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. The Bituminous Coal, Agricultural Adjustment and National Labor Relations Acts suffered a similar fate by majority vote. A fresh legislative approach to the question of planned Federal control over industry and agriculture was urgently needed to salvage the main features of the New Deal program. It was supplied through the novel application of a provision in the Constitution empowering the Federal Government to regulate interstate commerce: an application that in its manifold effects is a far cry from any intention entertained by the Signers.

For this ingenious advice, FDR was obligated to Felix Frankfurter who continued to make himself available in a supernumerary capacity. Somewhat against his own better judgment, the little law professor also supported Roosevelt’s ill-fated attempt to pack the Supreme Court —though Frankfurter felt that time and new appointments could be depended upon to provide justices more nearly subservient to the Executive will. For service rendered, he was finally rewarded in 1938 with the fulfillment of his heart’s desire: a seat on the Supreme Court.

In that sheltered eminence Frankfurter could enjoy the prerogatives for which he had apparently yearned. Making some obvious concessions to the traditional aloofness of the Supreme Court, he appeared less frequently at the White House and proffered less direct advice; but when he did speak, he was listened to! (13) It was on Frankfurter’s recommendation that FDR dispatched Harry Hopkins to England even before the Lend-Lease Act had been passed. (14) And it was invariably Frankfurter who took a final, critical look at President Roosevelt’s major policy speeches and “fireside chats” before they were delivered. Frankfurters lifelong friendship and daily morning strolls with his Georgetown neighbor, Dean Acheson, whose rise in the State Department hierarchy he sponsored, are credited with having had a profound effect on American foreign policy—especially during those years when Presidents Roosevelt and Truman were delivering the hegemony of a large portion of the globe to Soviet Russia and Communist China.

Officially, the Supreme Court remained Frankfurter’s prime field of concentration until his retirement in 1961—as it had been the chief subject of his studies and published articles prior to his elevation to the Supreme Court. During his tenure, the quality and temper of that once-August body altered visibly, and its “law-making” function was emphasized at the expense of the legislative power of the Congress. Though Frankfurter’s role was conveniently veiled by the secrecy governing the Supreme Court’s deliberations, it has been a potent one. There he could contribute obliquely, whether by his own action or his influence on less learned colleagues, to the gradual decline of that separation of powers inherent in the Constitution, which has been recognized since 1898 by British Fabians as the most serious obstacle to the advance of Socialism in America.

2.

Among the self-proclaimed liberals and progressives clustered around FDR, most of whom dissembled their Socialist purpose for reasons of practical politics, Harold J. Laski was a bird of gaudier plumage. He was the popular image of the Red Professor, who could never resist airing his views in or out of season. Laski made no secret of his Marxist beliefs and openly advocated social revolution, whether by consent or by violence. Anyone who adopted him as a pet, solicited his articles, promoted him as a teacher of American youth, or listened seriously to his ideas on national or international policy, at least had no illusions as to where Laski stood. Possibly the only fact about him not fully advertised was his connection after 1940, with the Fabian International Bureau.

Precocious child of a middle class merchant in Manchester, England, Harold Laski joined the Fabian Society at Oxford and to the end of his life remained one of its most vocal members. Declared unfit for military service in World War I, he took a teaching post at McGill University in Canada. There he was speedily discovered by Norman Hapgood, a Hearst magazine editor of Socialist leanings, who made a special trip from Toronto to Montreal to meet Laski. Hapgood described this “extraordinary, brilliant young man” to Felix Frankfurter, who obtained an instructorship for Laski at Harvard in 1915 and became his closest friend. The following summer, to supplement a minute income, young Laski was also provided a job in Philadelphia cataloguing the papers of the deceased soap magnate, Joseph I. Fels.

During the four years he taught at Harvard, Laski edited the Harvard Law Review, devoting a whole issue to Duguit, the father of Soviet law, and began studies for a doctorate which he never completed. He contributed articles frequently to the New Republic; flashed like a comet across the Left Wing intellectual scene in Boston and New York; and wrote a rather pretentious book Authority in the Modern State, which he dedicated jointly to Felix Frankfurter and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Laski’s May-and-December friendship with the aging Holmes has been widely publicized. Disingenuously, Laski once advised him to read the History of the Fabian Society by Edward R. Pease—”rather a pleasant book in its way.”(15)

Tired, bored and seeking mental diversion, Holmes took “great pleasure” in the “dear boy’s” companionship and phenomenal display of learning. Laski, like Sidney Webb, had a photographic memory. It enabled him to quote whole passages from the most recondite works, even citing the pages on which they appeared. An inveterate namedropper, he also had a lifelong tendency to recall meetings with the great that never happened—and in which, of course, he figured to advantage. Since he told a good story, and since he actually did know a surprising number of distinguished persons for one so young, his admirers condoned that harmless mythomania. (16)

When he went to teach at Harvard, Laski was just twenty-two. Frail, undersized and looking even smaller in his dark English suits, he had the air of a preternaturally wise child, mostly head, eyes and round horn-rimmed glasses. Appearing anything but dangerous, he still managed to attract an immoderate amount of attention, as he was destined to do all his life. This was not only because of his conspicuous gifts, but also because of the opinions he felt called upon to impart on a wide range of controversial topics—particularly, the Russian Revolution.

While he had his defenders, Laski provoked a good deal of spontaneous resentment among the general student body, which devoted an entire issue of the Harvard Lampoon to attacking him. He won notoriety in Greater Boston by getting himself involved in the police strike of 1919. Though never officially asked to leave Harvard, even his best friends agreed at the time it might be wiser for him to move on.

Leading lights of the Fabian Society made a concerted effort to find the proper niche for Harold at home. His sponsors included Graham Wallas, then lecturing in New York at the New School for Social Research; Sidney Webb, supreme pontiff of the Fabian Society; and Lord Haldane, a governor of the London School of Economics, who had just allied himself publicly with the Fabians and the British Labour Party. (17) With their backing, Laski was offered a place at the London School, and in a very few years inherited Graham Wallas’ chair of Political Science. To qualify for the promotion Laski wrote a massive tome, The Grammar of Politics, which started by taking gradualist Socialism for granted and ended with a frankly Marxist position. Praised by Sidney Webb, it became a standard university textbook, replacing nineteenth century texts on political science just as it has since been replaced by more fashionable Socialist works.

Laski’s highly personalized method of teaching—a technique similar to G. D. H. Cole’s in England and Felix Frankfurter’s in the United States—gained him fervent followers among the young people who Hocked to study under him. They came not only from the United Kingdom but from Asia, Africa and America, in the decades when Rockefeller Foundation grants were helping to build the London School of Economics into a world center of Socialist instruction. Laski’s classes were filled to overflowing with students of every hue and color, and they stood in line outside his office waiting to consult him.

Consciously he strove to instill his own Marxist doctrines in future leaders of revolutionary movements from outposts of tale Empire which he hoped and schemed to dissolve. Tom Mboya of Kenya’s African National Union Party and the saturnine Krishna Menon of India were among the pupils whose contact with him outlasted their university days. At one time, it was said, most of the senior civil servants in Nehru’s government were former students of Laski’s. Of the young men indoctrinated by him at the London School, not a few occupy top posts in their own countries today—especially in the so-called developing nations.

Outside of the classroom he agitated ceaselessly in public lectures, periodicals and personal correspondence for one burning global issue after another—Freedom for India, Ethiopia, the Spanish Loyalists— and generally urged cooperation between Liberals, Socialists and Communists. He served with Leonard Woolf and John Strachey as a director of the strongly pro-Soviet Left Book Club. Though the director of the London School, Sir William Beveridge, expressed some fear that Laski’s outspoken hostility to the capitalist system might discourage the flow of contributions, such fears proved groundless. A total of $3,000,000 for buildings, research and general expenses was donated by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation to the London School from 1924 through 1949, while Harold Laski served in its department of Political Science.

Like G. D. H. Cole—an equally avowed Marxist, and a pedagogue whose influence on the coming generation of Fabian Socialist leaders rivaled Laski’s—he frankly aimed to mold the minds of future government officials at home and abroad. Britain’s post World War II Foreign Minister, Socialist Ernest Bevin, who did not always see eye to eye with Laski, once told a Labour Party Conference: “If it’s the universities that are to be criticized, well, put up a vote of censure on Harold Laski, because it’s the product of the universities I have got to accept!”(18)

Laski’s influence on alumni of the mines, shipyards and factories in Britain was also considerable. Despite his reputation for intellectual snobbism, a number of trade union officials who rose to government office with the British Labour Party regularly turned to him for advice. Emanuel Shinwell of the Miners’ Union, for example, who enjoyed quite a reputation as a revolutionary agitator, wrote in his autobiography: “My mind was finally made up after a conversation with my late friend, Harold Laski . . . I lifted up my telephone and spoke to Atlee. I told him I would accept the Secretaryship of State for War.” (19)

While Laski never aspired to nor accepted political office himself, he remained an audible offstage presence, irritating at times to the old pros of the Parliamentary Labour Party but impossible to ignore. In 1932, he joined a little group of militants inside the Labour Party who called themselves the Socialist League; and, in 1937, he signed their Unity Manifesto urging a united front in Britain between Labour and the Communist Party against Fascism. Significantly, most of the Labour Party members signing that petition were intellectuals and outstanding figures in the Fabian Society.(20)

After the Popular Front movement in which he was active had been forcibly dissolved, Laski still argued in 1939-40 for a friendly attitude toward Soviet Russia, no matter how badly that country had behaved in Finland, Poland and the Baltic States.(21) In February, 1941, he initiated a correspondence with Herbert Morrison, Fabian Socialist Home Secretary in the coalition Cabinet of Winston Churchill, to make sure that the “civil rights” of Communists in wartime Britain were being protected. Following Hitler’s invasion of Russia, Laski was one of the first and most ardent spokesmen for all-out aid to the Soviet Union, with a view to securing Russian cooperation in a postwar Socialist world.(22)

From 1939, Laski sat on the Executive of the British Labour Party. Under the prevailing system of rotation, he automatically became its chairman in 1945–the year in which the Party rode to power on the strength of its deceptive promise to abolish poverty. Chairman of the Labour Party’s campaign committee and policy subcommittee in that critical election year was Herbert Morrison, by then on exceedingly close terms with Laski.

Following the Party’s victory at the polls, Professor Laski made an astounding proposal to Clement Attlee, its Parliamentary Leader since 1935. He invited Attlee to abdicate and allow the incoming parliamentary majority to elect a leader—presumably Herbert Morrison, to whose campaign aid a number of the newly elected Labour M.P.’s owed their seats and who, in Laski’s opinion, would have made a much better Prime Minister than Attlee. While not unconstitutional under British law, a more inept suggestion has rarely been offered by a political pundit.

Curtly, Attlee replied, “Dear Laski, I thank you for your letter, contents of which have been noted.” (23) When Ernest Bevin, boss of the powerful Transport Workers’ Union, learned of the “chicanery,” he moved promptly in Attlee’s behalf and no more was heard of the matter. Needless to say, this bit of backstage business did not endear Laski to Prime Minister Attlee or Foreign Minister Bevin, and effectively precluded him from becoming personal adviser-in-chief to the Labour Party Government as he so ardently longed to be.

For all that, Laski could neither be ignored nor suppressed. From 1946 to 1948 he was voted chairman of the London Fabian Society, which supplied the plans, legislation and key personnel for the Labour Government in Britain and to which over two-thirds of its parliamentary majority belonged. Moreover, Laski was idolized by foreign Socialists, a number of whom held cabinet rank in their own countries after the war—especially in France, Belgium, the Scandinavian countries and in Czechoslovakia, where Laski advised the Benes Government to cooperate with the Communists. Followers of Pietro Nenni in postwar Italy hailed him as “a figure comparable with Marx in the intellectual history of Socialism.” Despite his ineptitude in practical affairs, to the end Harold Laski remained a symbol of the International Socialist Professor, who used his connections abroad to affect the course of British policy when deterred from doing so at home.

Never admitting that a man cannot serve two masters, Harold Laski often referred to the United States as his second country. Few Americans even in his own time realized how large a part of his adult life was spent in the United States, or how deep a swath he cut in both educational and governmental circles in America. Of his thirty-odd year teaching and advisory career, it is estimated that almost one third was spent in North American colleges and universities, either as a visiting professor or special lecturer.

Following his early fiasco at Harvard, Laski was to return to this country again and again as a paid and feted guest. He gave a series of formal lectures at the Universities of North Carolina and Indiana; taught for a semester in 1939 at Columbia University Teachers’ College; lectured more briefly at Yale and at Princeton’s bicentennial, and at the State Universities of Washington, Oregon, California and Colorado; and in 1948 Laski debated Senator Robert Taft at Kenyon College in Ohio. Of course, he made numerous appearances at the New School for Social Research in New York City where he helped to organize a group of Socialist refugee professors.

After World War II he spent some time at Roosevelt University in Chicago where his disciple from the London School, Professor Herman Finer, also held forth. Laski’s final tour in the United States was made under the auspices of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, to deliver the Sidney Hillman Memorial Lectures, jointly sponsored by that Socialist-directed union and local institutions of higher learning from coast to coast.

More frankly Marxist in doctrine than some other members of the London Fabian Society, Laski’s lectures and writings conveyed a revolutionary message not necessarily couched in Marxist jargon. If it was true, as his friend Louis Fischer once wrote unkindly, that Laski lived increasingly in an “intellectual ghetto” on his visits to the United States, geographically the area was widely dispersed. Across the years he developed connections in the academic life of America enjoyed by few other foreign professors, and he recruited an army of followers among faculty and students. Though Laski seemed to cause only a passing furore at womens’ clubs and university pink teas, in the long run he built up a serious network of Socialist propagandists and Soviet sympathizers, many of whom are still active in education and politics today. In falling heir to Graham Wallas’ chair at the London School, Harold Laski also inherited Wallas’ function as the London Fabian Society’s foremost missionary to America’s colleges and universities.

In 1929, Laski contributed a significant article to The Socialism of Our Times, the symposium edited by Harry W. Laidler and Norman Thomas and issued by the League for Industrial Democracy. (24) Some of the points contained in that article had previously appeared over his signature in Harper’s magazine for June, 1928, and subsequently reappeared mor concretely in the programs of the New Deal.

Specifically, Laski urged Socialists to take the initiative in sponsoring an eventual Federal program of “social insurance” leading, as always, to the welfare state. He supported municipal ownership of public services, such as gas and electricity, street railways and savings banks, “to demonstrate the superiority of collectivism to the average voter.” He advocated for the courts in America, “reform” such as his good friend, Felix Frankfurter, was then attempting on a state-wide scale for Governor Franklin Roosevelt of New York. Above all, Laski advised Socialists to agitate endlessly in favor of taxation for social—not merely administrative—uses. “Pressure for higher taxation on unearned and larger incomes is vital,” he wrote, [with] “amounts so raised to be used as grants in aid to the States for social purposes.” (25) What Laski did not say, was that the lion’s share of any funds raised for such purposes would still have to come from the pockets of the working people—since taxes on the rich, however punitive, would never suffice to pay for the program.

In conclusion, he stated: “I feel strongly the impossibility of American political institutions today, from the angle of a movement toward Socialist measures. The separation of powers is the protective rampart of American individualism.(26) This is interesting in view of Laski’s prolonged intimacy with Felix Frankfurter, who became a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Laski was a periodic house guest of Frankfurter in Cambridge and later in Washington, and for a quarter century carried on a voluminous correspondence with his “dearest Felix” that kept the latter constantly informed on the Fabian Socialist outlook in London. Those letters, profusely quoted in Laski’s biography by Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, also included comments and recommendations on American policy which Frankfurter was in an unrivaled position to transmit to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Professor Laski’s politico-social fellowship with Felix Frankfurter and Evans Clark of the Twentieth Century Fund cannot be discounted as a merely personal association. For Laski, like G. D. H. Cole, Graham Wallas and the Webbs, was first, last and always a professional revolutionary of the gradualist school. Every private contact he cultivated and virtually every line he wrote in his microscopic handwriting, no matter how heavily coated with endearments, was as charged with political intention as a telegraph cable is charged with electricity.

His intimacy in America with members of the original Roosevelt brain trust in Albany, plus his close connections in London with Israel Sieff and the founders of PEP, gave him a matchless opportunity to synchronize the ideas of British and American Fabian Socialists in formulating plans for the New Deal. Inevitably, he was aware that FDR would be pushed as the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Presidency, long before the American public had any knowledge of it.

Laski was in the United States in 1928-29 following FDR’s election as Governor of New York, and again in 1931, returning to deliver a Kingsway Hall lecture in London on “The American Collapse.” (27) He was in America during the fateful first “hundred days” of 1933 and reported his observations briefly at a Fabian Society evening social. (28) Soon after the National Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Professor Laski spoke at a Fabian Society Friends’ Hall lecture on “The Failure of the American Experiment.” He {rayed the United States Constitution as a class document, calling it “Capitalism’s strongest safeguard on earth today”; and added that Roosevelt was America’s sole bulwark “against the Fascist form of Capitalism.” What was needed both in America and England, he claimed, was a united front of all liberal and left wing groups (including the Communists) to “save Democracy.” Either Capitalism or Democracy would prevail, he said, in America as in Europe—a strange species of political science, equating democracy with the Socialist commonwealth.(29)

Precisely when, where or how Professor Laski first met Franklin D. Roosevelt is not recorded by their official biographers. Evidently the two were introduced by a trusted mutual friend—generally believed to have been Felix Frankfurter—under casual and informal circumstances. Their original encounter could have taken place during any one of Laski’s frequent trips to the United States in the late nineteen-twenties or early nineteen-thirties. Eleanor Roosevelt was not present, for she stated in 1956 (30) that she had never met Laski but believed he was “honest”—a characteristic non sequitur! Nevertheless, it is recorded that the honestly Marxist professor paid a number of calls on FDR at his office in the White House; was acquainted with the Roosevelt daughter, Anna; and was the recipient of warm and approving personal letters from the President himself.

The extent to which Professor Laski and his ideas were persona grata at the White House from the very outset of the Roosevelt Administration can be gauged by the fact that Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. sent his two eldest sons to study under Laski at the London School of Economics. No Marxist himself, the senior Kennedy was already several times a millionaire. The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression had shaken Kennedy’s confidence, however, in the durability of the capitalist economy, although he suffered no serious financial loss and was even reputed to have made money by selling short on the market.

During 1932 Kennedy, Sr. was quoted as saying that he would gladly sacrifice half his fortune in order to save the other half for his children—a pledge which he was, happily for him, never called upon to fulfill. In that frame of mind, he traveled aboard the original Roosevelt campaign train and contributed generously to FDR’s election. While waiting to succeed James M. Landis, Dean of the Harvard Law School, as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Kennedy pere offered up his firstborn as an ideological hostage. During 1933-34, in the interval between his graduation from Choate School and matriculation at Harvard, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. was sent to study political science at the London School. He made the grand tour to Moscow under the chaperonage of Professor and Mrs. Laski. (31)

According to the Harvard College De-cennial Report on the Class of 1938, Joe’s year at the London School,

“was a tremendous experience, as it was under Professor Laski that young Joe developed his dominant ambition to devote himself to a career in public service. Indeed, referring to Joe’s interest in politics, Professor Laski speaks of his determination to be nothing less than President of the United States.” It was this interest that was to guide his studies at Harvard . . . and which dominated his whole life after graduation in 1938.”

In 1940, as a junior member of the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic National Convention, young Joe resisted the pressures for a third term “draft” of President Roosevelt and bravely cast his vote for James M. Farley. Though he may not have realized it at the time, that vote ended Joe Kennedy, Jr.’s hopes for a political career via the Democratic Party almost as effectively as his subsequent tragic demise in a World War II bomber over Germany.

There was a second Kennedy son, however, who did almost everything that Joe did, being the understudy of his admired older brother. In 1934-35 he, too, went to learn about politics from Professor Laski in London. Imitatively he was no less affected by the experience than Joe, Jr. had been, even though he did not complete the full scholastic year owing to an attack of jaundice. When Joe, Jr. was killed in action during World War II, it was Jack who stepped into his brother’s shoes and achieved his brother’s hoped-for political role. Thus Professor H. J. Laski, British Fabian Socialist and self-proclaimed Marxist, had the rare distinction of helping indirectly to select and to educate two Democrat Presidents of the United States: Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy

Probably Laski’s most prized contribution to the domestic policies of the New Deal was the idea of using Federal tax-moneys as grants in aid to the States for social purposes. Eagerly adopted by New Deal strategists and never legally challenged to this day, Laski’s suggestion proved remarkably useful to FDR in perpetuating both himself and the Democratic Party in office.

As the apparent author of that handy device, Laski became a special favorite of President Roosevelt. In a letter of January 10, 1939, FDR wrote Professor Laski that he would be “honored and happy to have you dedicate the little book to me.” (32) The book in question was a series of essays entitled The American Presidency. Three weeks later the American President again wrote to Laski, then in Seattle, thanking him for a reprint of one of the essays and saying: “Come and see me as soon as you get East.” (33) The book was published in 1940, the year when Roosevelt ran for a third term in defiance of all previous Presidential tradition.

Complaints about Laski, no matter how valid, never reached the American people, entranced as they were by the beneficent father-image of FDR that New Deal psychologists had created. On January 14,1941, Congressman Tinkham of Massachusetts read into the House Record a warning by Amos Pinchot, disillusioned former Socialist and brother of Pennsylvania’s liberal former Governor. Somewhat belatedly, Pinchot pointed out that Laski and other English radicals were working on President Roosevelt with the object of introducing Socialism into the United States. He stated boldly: “Many young Socialists declare that what is generally called the Roosevelt Program is in reality the Laski Program, imposed on New Deal thinkers, and finally on the President, by the London Professor of Economics [sic] and his friends.”

Still the great voting public in America remained unaware of Laski’s existence: he was caviar for the intellectual elite. After Roosevelt’s death, Congressman Woodruff of Michigan published an extension of remarks in the House Record of February 6, 1946, denouncing Laski and to a lesser extent Lord Keynes. The Congressman declared that Professor Laski had for some time “had a backdoor key to the White House.” And he added, “a surprising number of us, Professor, have begun to think it is time to change the lock.”

Such rare observations, while correctly assessing the general influence of British Fabian Socialists on the New Deal and its successor, the Fair Deal, were weakened by a lack of corroborative detail. They failed to note that a number of the ideas advanced before 1940 by Professor Laski and his friends originated in the New Fabian Research Bureau, and after 1940 mirrored programs of the Fabian International Bureau and the Socialist International. Moreover, patriots of an earlier day were hampered by not having access to the Laski-Frankfurter and Laski-Roosevelt letters—which have since been quoted in part by the Professor’s friendly biographer, Kingsley Martin, although never revealed in their entirety.

Even Robert Sherwood’s heavily documented volume, Roosevelt and Hopkins, which appeared in 1948, omitted any mention of Harry Hopkins’ talks with Laski during Lend-Lease taps to England. Himself a New Deal henchman, Sherwood scrupulously avoided pointing out that Hopkins’ views on wartime aid to Russia coincided with the opinions expressed by Professor Laski both in letters and in print. (34) In fact, Harold Laski’s name was not even listed in the index of the Sherwood opus. Yet President Roosevelt, replying to a letter from Laski after America’s entry into World War II, wrote: “Dear Harold, So good to hear from you again. Hopkins has already told me of his visit with you, and everything reported to me checks with the many things you told me.”(35)

Again and again during World War II, Laski asserted that it was the duty of a popular leader to lay the foundations for postwar Socialism. (36) In that way, social revolution might be brought about by popular consent—perhaps simultaneously in many countries. (37) This Fabian Socialist design also involved preserving, at any price and any sacrifice, the friendship of Soviet Russia; for the kind of postwar world that Laski envisioned presumed something more than superficial coexistence with the USSR. The question of Allied war aims became the main burden of his articles in both British and American publications, as it was of his private correspondence.

After Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, Laski argued that the future depended on America’s and Britain’s ability to convert a temporary wartime alliance with the Soviet Union into a lasting postwar partnership. No guarantees of good faith were required from the Soviets. The immediate program of wartime assistance must be such as to convince Communist leaders that the capitalist nations were their loyal allies, and that they would only make peace on terms acceptable to Soviet Russia.(38)

The long-range program of cooperation to follow the war was more subtle. Laski contended that Soviet Russia and the Western powers might learn a great deal from each other.(39) While the USSR was more advanced in Socialist organization, possibly she could be induced to see the advantage of practicing a little more social and religious tolerance. The eternal hope of Fabian Socialists that the Soviet Union would “mellow” as a result of contacts with the West was still being echoed as recently as 1963 by spokesmen of the New Frontier, and was announced as a presumptive fact in the Fabian News of August, 1963.

About six months after Pearl Harbor, Professor Laski received a cordial invitation from Eleanor Roosevelt to address the International Students’ Congress to be held in Washington during September, 1942. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that she would be “particularly happy” if Laski could be there to speak to the young people, and she invited him to stay at the White House—”as I know it would give my husband as well as myself a great deal of pleasure to have an opportunity to see you.”(40)

If Laski had quietly applied for a visa in the routine way, he would probably have received it. Filled with a strong sense of his own importance, however, he took the unusual step of asking Churchill’s permission. Since Laski had for months been publicly critical of Churchill, as possessing an anti-Socialist outlook and “eighteenth century mentality,” the Prime Minister quite reasonably declined to grant him an opportunity for airing such sentiments in Washington.(41) So Eleanor Roosevelt never had the pleasure of seeing him—and Laski seems naively to have lost his only chance for a face-to-face discussion with FDR concerning the shape of the postwar world to come.

He could still wield a potent pen, however, and he proceeded to do so until the end of the war. Since mail to and from the President of the United States or a Supreme Court Justice was classed as “privileged” by Allied censors, Laski could be assured of privacy when writing to Roosevelt and Frankfurter. If he preferred, he could always send letters or articles to the Washington Post and the New York Nation via the U.S. Embassy pouch. Soon after Christmas in 1942 he wrote to FDR: “…above all, I hope you will teach our Prime Minister that it is the hopes of the future and not the achievements of the past from which he must draw his inspiration.” Though Roosevelt and Frankfurter both reproved Laski for his increasingly sharp attacks on Churchill, privately they enjoyed his comments—especially FDR, who according to eyewitnesses found personal amusement in forcing Winston to play second fiddle to himself and Stalin at Big Three conferences.

Essentially, Laski’s wartime mission with reference to the United States resembled Ray Stannard Baker’s at the end of World War I. In private letters, destined to be read by the President or retailed to him, Laski discoursed on the state of the nation and the state of mind of the “common man” in England. Hints on postwar aims and “some sort of world organisation” to follow the war were interwoven with human anecdotes and the political gossip that Roosevelt loved.

Just as Baker had done, Laski reported that America’s President was the only hope of the working masses in Britain—and everywhere else—for a better life after the war. By nourishing Roosevelt’s messianic delusion, which was no less pronounced in its way than Woodrow Wilson’s had been, Laski encouraged the President to take a stand on postwar matters that coincided with the views of the Fabian International Bureau. Often it involved preferring the interests of Soviet Russia over those of the British Empire or the United States itself.

As early as December, 1941, Laski had written to Felix Frankfurter:

“At present the masses of Britain have, I think, three clear convictions. (i) Churchill is a grand war leader. (ii) The U.S.S.R. shows it has roots in popular opinion more profound than any other system. (iii) The only man who can define purposes which prevent collapse and chaos after the war is the President. Whether he will have his chance in time, whether he can find a successor to continue his policies, these are things we endlessly discuss in common, not I fear, too hopefully.”(42)

This was no simple outpouring of private hopes and fears. Coming from a member of the Fabian Executive and addressed to FDR’s foremost privy councillor, it had the quality of a succinct and far-reaching policy directive. It sheds new light on the peculiar urgency of Harry Hopkins, Frankfurter’s nominee for Lend-Lease powers, to give the USSR more than enough of everything to carry her through the fighting phases of the war; and helps to explain Hopkins’ insistence on regarding Soviet Russia rather than Britain as the “decisive factor” to be considered.(43) Moreover, it provides a clue to the otherwise inexplicable Big Three conferences, where the United States was committed to satisfying the Soviet Union’s territorial and geographic postwar aims. Historically, secret covenants between nations have sometimes preceded a war; but never before has a superior power rushed to award the fruits of victory to the greediest and most impoverished of military partners while a war was still in progress!

Fear that President Roosevelt, a willing Fabian Socialist captive, might fail to succeed himself in 1944, or might not physically survive World War II, supplied a motive for the premature concessions granted to Soviet Russia at Teheran and Yalta. The Teheran Conference of 1943, which preceded the cross-Channel invasion of Europe desired by Stalin and opposed by Churchill, in effect assured the USSR of a free hand in Eastern Europe plus confirming her hold on Poland and the Baltic countries. Roosevelt’s obviously failing health in 1945 hastened the Yalta Conference that delivered Manchuria to Soviet forces and enabled them to furnish the Chinese Communist armies with enough captured Japanese military materiel to insure Communist control over the mainland of China.

Thus a President of the United States, acting in his Supreme Court-affirmed capacity of absolute military Commander-in-chief, circumvented the postwar treaty-making powers of the Congress by presenting it with a series of accomplished facts. Even the format of the postwar United Nations was agreed upon at Teheran. The Fabian Socialist allies of Bolshevism had learned a lesson from Woodrow Wilson’s experience after World War I, and were determined not to risk a repetition. On the strength of these events it has since been alleged, with reason, that in modern times the most effective foreign agents of the Soviet Union operate as Fabian Socialists.

Before leaving Washington for Yalta, Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 16, 1945, dictated and signed what must have been his last personal letter to Harold Laski. From the broken, almost illegible handwriting that appears in the signature, one seeing it could deduce that the author was a very sick man.(44) Besides mentioning the forthcoming meeting with Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill, and FDR’s own hope of visiting England and seeing Laski in the summer to come, the letter contained this meaningful assurance: “Our goal is, as you say, identical for the long range objectives ….” (45)

3.

Men whose goal is revolution, whether subtle or violent, have often made use of inspired charlatans—soothsayers, astrologers, numerologists, cultists of one kind or another, who could convey a revolutionary message in high-flown double talk. During the decades culminating in the French Revolution, for example, there arose a whole line of magnificent imposters, “who posed as initiators of the occult sciences, as possessors of the Great Secret and the Grand Magisterium; and there in consequence, the Higher Mysteries . . . They took root and flourished, developing an hundred splendors of romantic legends, of sonorous names and titles.”(46)

Of these the most splendid and the most successful was a self-ennobled Italian barber known as Count Cagliostro. Practicing alchemy, occultism and the healing arts, he bewitched a cultivated public in half a dozen tongues, as well as in a private jargon that had meaning for the initiate alone. Forecasting the future was his specialty. Even now, almost two centuries later, there are still scholars prepared to debate the point as to whether he was a savant or a rogue.

Cagliostro was the sensation of Paris and Strasbourg, where respectable bankers vied with one another to take advantage of his prognostications and to supply him with funds. At one time his patron was a Prince Royal, the brother of Louis XVI, sometimes called Philippe Egalite—leader of that liberal wing of the nobility who sympathized with the first stages of the French Revolution and most of whom subsequently went to the guillotine. Cagliostro’s elaborate intrigues played a well-known part in hastening the fall of the established order in France.(47) Who would have suspected him, in his heyday, of harboring such a purpose?

Spiritual heir and latter-day facsimile of that darling of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, was a Cambridge University don named John Maynard Keynes. He, too, was a magnificent figure: six feet three, and superbly tailored; an authority on wines, fine foods and beautiful women; patron of the arts, and master of the English language which he only distorted by design. He, too, posed as the possessor of elusive secrets, key to the Higher Mysteries of economics and public finance. More fortunate in his origins than Cagliostro, Keynes’ final role was as bursar of Kings College, Cambridge. There he studied the dietary habits of pigs with a view to improving the breed on the college-owned farm; and he ruled over the Political Economy Club, where his followers were made privy to the master’s techniques for apprehending and controlling future events.

An alchemist who succeeded in substituting paper for gold, a mystifier who claimed that money multiplied itself in the spending, Keynes compelled bankers to do his bidding and imposed his schemes on the highest personages in an age of political unreason. In the long run, his inspired economic gibberish and esoteric fiscal panaceas did more to promote the insolvency of English-speaking nations and speed the timetable of world-wide social revolution than any forthright revolutionary arguments could have done. It is a commentary on the moral and intellectual fiber of the times that, while Cagliostro died in poverty and disgrace, John Maynard Keynes ended his days as a self-made millionaire and authentic peer of the realm, mourned by a school of professional disciples pledged to perpetuate and update his more destructive fantasies.

The same question can be asked about Keynes that is asked about Cagliostro: Was he charlatan, adventurer, trickster, or the friend of humanity he claimed to be? Was Lord Keynes a highly polished secret weapon of the Fabian Socialist conspiracy to weaken the capitalist system progressively by consent of its beneficiaries—at the same time retaining its productive machinery intact for the benefit of the heirs? Or was he the good physician dedicated to prolonging life? The plain answer has long been obscured by the circumstance that Keynes’ reputation(48)—like the currencies he strove to manage—was systematically inflated through the efforts of a fervent Fabian Socialist claque on both sides of the Atlantic, while his ideas were usually represented as being too profound for the ordinary man and woman to grasp.

The story of his life, told by followers and friends, in some details approaches the fabulous. Dr. Seymour Harris—professor of Economics at Harvard’s Littauer School of Business Administration, who became Senior Consultant to the United States Treasury Department in 1961 (49)—gravely reaffirms that Keynes was fascinated by the theory of compound interest before he was five years old. (50) While such Gargantuan precocity can be doubted, it is true that Keynes was born to an assured future in left wing economics. His father, John Neville Keynes, was a professor at Cambridge, who published a book in 1890 entitled The Scope and Method of Political Economy For its strictures against the free enterprise system, therein called laissez faire, the book was approved by early leaders of the London Fabian Society. It was also included on reading lists of Socialist-slanted works recommended by The American Fabian magazine to its public.

The younger Keynes was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, which qualified him almost automatically for entry into the British Civil Service. Though he took no scholastic honors at the university, somehow he acquired a reputation for brilliance due to his conversational talent and his cool insolence in debate. Moreover, as he was prompt to point out, the name Keynes properly pronounced rhymed with “brains.” His gifts of persuasion were apparent to undergraduate friends who nicknamed him Pozzo, (51) after a Renaissance mercenary noted for skill in courtly intrigue as well as in administering slow poisons.

Campus political organizations gave Keynes an opportunity to test his fine Italian hand. As a freshman he joined the Liberal Club, a youthful adjunct of the Liberal Party that came to power in England not many years later. As a sophomore he also became a member of the Fabian Society’s student chapter at Cambridge (52) guided by Professor G. Lowes Dickinson, whose adepts were enjoined to capture the Liberal Club by penetration. Keynes’ college circle included Bertrand Russell and Leonard Woolf, both well-known in later life for their propaganda services to Fabian Socialism; and the poet, Rupert Brooke, whom some Fabians still claim as their own, even though he discovered the meaning of patriotism before he died as a soldier in World War I. Keynes himself—in common with many British and American Socialists—was to file as a conscientious objector.(53)

Two of his father’s associates, Professor Alfred Marshall and A. C. Pigou, groomed young Keynes for a career in economics; but even with their help, he placed no better than twelfth in his final examination. It is amusing to find Marshall and Pigou, both classified in their day as Fabian Socialist sympathizers, dismissed by present-day Keynesians as “classical economists”–(54) along with any others who preceded or failed to accept the vision of revealed economic truth ultimately vouchsafed to the world by John Maynard Keynes.

The sympathetic Professor Marshall rescued Keynes from a minor clerkship in the Colonial Office, bringing him back to lecture on economics at Cambridge University. Later the joint patronage of Marshall, Pigou and Sidney Webb (himself escaped form bondage in the Colonial Office, to become the high priest of Fabian Socialism) was responsible for making Keynes editor of the Economic Journal in 1911, and secretary of the Royal Economic Society in 1913. These posts established the young hopeful as a presumably serious economist and lent him the prestige so necessary to his future policy-making role. The Fabian Research Department, organized in 1912, was available to supply statistics and to prepare articles on request.

After the outbreak of World War I, Keynes took refuge in the British Treasury Department, where he diverted himself in spare moments by working out a foolproof method of stock market speculation. All his life he enjoyed gambling(55)—bridge, poker, roulette; but like most people, he preferred a sure thing. When the war ended, he found an opportunity for putting his system of mental wagers into practice. Beginning in 1919 with a moderate stake of four thousand pounds (less than $20,000), he parlayed it by 1937 into a neat fortune of 500,000 pounds (about 2.5 million dollars). A goodly share of his winnings resulted from the lowered interest rates that he promoted so assiduously in official quarters, and that caused the list prices of certain common stocks to rise.(56) Throughout the thirties he also speculated profitably in foreign exchange and public utilities stocks.

During the nineteen-twenties Keynes headed an investment firm in London, in partnership with former Treasury colleagues, and displayed what appeared to be an uncanny faculty for predicting politico-economic trends likely to affect the stock market. To selected clients, he gave the benefit of his insight. These included his future bade, a beauteous Russian ballerina of the Diaghilev troupe, whose investments he offered to handle and whom he married in 1925—the same year that he made a trip to Soviet Russia. It has been reported by informed sources that stock market tips, originating with Keynes, paid the expenses of the unofficial and official Soviet embassies in London from 1924 to 1932. At that period he was tireless in his demands that the British Treasury provide fuller statistics on national investment and foreign exchange.

Keynes’ international bent owed much to a friendship renewed in London with his old Fabian Socialist college chum, Leonard Woolf. Throughout his long bachelorhood (he married at forty-two) the lanky and personable Keynes was identified with the so-called Bloomsbury group revolving about Leonard Woolf and his wife, Virginia. It was composed of highly educated and magnified(57) upper middle class bohemians, talented and successful practitioners of literature or the arts. They were addicted to group-opinions and to a superficially critical, but none the less protective, attitude towards Soviet Russia.

An apparent point of difference with Russian Marxism was their belief that collectivist-minded intellectuals—rather than what Keynes called “the boorish proletariat”—were destined to become the professional rulers of an ideal future world. Bertrand Russell once described the Bloomsbury Fabians as a passionate mutual admiration clique of the elite; and there is no doubt they contributed greatly to the myth of Keynes’ unique mental powers.

It may be recalled that from 1915 Leonard Woolf was also the London Fabian Society’s leading amateur of international affairs; the author of International Government, which supplied the first blueprint for the League of Nations; head of the New Fabian Research Bureau’s international committee; a founder and for ten years chairman of the Fabian International Bureau. Woolf’s views on World Government and German reparations were faithfully reflected by John Maynard Keynes, when the latter attended the Versailles Peace Conference as a member of the British Treasury delegation.

There, as one of the younger dissidents, British and American, grouped around Colonel E. M. House, Keynes established long-lasting ties with Walter Lippmann and with Felix Frankfurter who represented the Zionist cause at the Peace Conference. (58) Returning from Paris, Keynes expressed their mutual dissatisfactions in his first book-length work, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Lippmann and Frankfurter helped arrange for its publication in America, where it was touted and officially distributed by the League for Industrial Democracy as it was by the Fabian Society in Great Britain and the Colonies. (59) Here Keynes announced frankly that capitalism in Europe was doomed.

Not directly active in politics, Keynes retained a nominal affiliation with the Liberal Party and avoided declaring himself a Socialist. Inevitably, he sided with the Asquith Liberals, who were instrumental in handing over the reins of government to the Fabian-led Labour Party in 1924. During the election year, he delivered a famed anticapitalist lecture at Cambridge, published in 1926 as The End of Laissez Faire. There—like his father before him—he identified modern capitalism with the early nineteenth century foreign trade doctrine known as laissez faire, based on earlier and cruder forms of industrial production. Professor David McCord Wright of McGill University, Montreal—himself an admirer, in some respects, of Keynes —has noted that the “day of judgment” which Keynes predicted recurrently for capitalism was in reality purest milk of the Marxian word.(60)

In 1923, Keynes bought a controlling interest in The Nation and Athenaeum, placed it under the editorship of the well-known Fabian Socialist, Kingsley Martin; and utilized it as a vehicle of personal opinion and aggrandizement for himself and his friends. His widely-publicized attacks on the gold standard, appearing there and elsewhere, eventually persuaded the British people and certain Treasury officials as well, that the use of gold as a basis for monetary value was the chief cause of unemployment in England and the only begetter of the Great Depression. When Keynes complained in 1932 that for twelve years he had exercised no influence whatever on British Treasury policy, there was more than a touch of poetic license in his lament.

In 1929, he was named by Philip Snowden, Fabian Socialist Chancellor of the Exchequer, to an official Committee of Inquiry into Finance and Industry; and from 1930 he served on the MacDonald government’s economic Advisory Council. The unprecedented attack and public humiliation to which he subjected Sir Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, as a witness before the Macmillan Committee in 1931, set the stage for Great Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard, so strongly advocated by Keynes.

Fiscal and economic plans of the Labour Party Government from 1929 to 1931 echoed a Keynesian formula by now grown familiar to Americans. It was estimated that a government-financed public works program, designed to increase employment by 5 per cent, would “increase” the Treasury’s income by one and one half per cent via taxes. This windfall, supplemented by a 7 percent cut in defense expenditures, would serve to launch the Labour Party’s welfare program. Deficit spending and a managed currency, both implied in these recommendations, were not stressed in the public announcement.

When politics intervened to prevent application of such a plan in England, it was exported to the United States, where it provided a basic pattern for New Deal budgets of the nineteen-thirties. The idea of “paying” for politically profitable welfare programs’ by stripping the defense establishment was a long-cherished Socialist scheme that proved agreeable to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In consequence, U.S. Army recruits hastily called up after Pearl Harbor were discovered to be drilling with dummy rifles made of wood. Shelved for almost twenty-five years thereafter, the double-barreled Fabian Socialist scheme to procure funds for the “war against poverty” by a gradual process of military disarmament was suddenly revived by the Johnson Administration in 1964, as if it were a new invention.

First public intimation that British Fabian Socialists meant to foist their largely untried fiscal remedies upon the United States Government came on December 31,1933. On that date, The New York Times printed an open letter from John Maynard Keynes to President Franklin D. Roosevelt which filled the better part of a page in the Sunday paper. The advice it contained was at once so paradoxical and so remote from the preoccupations of the average citizen that relatively few readers took it seriously. Only a handful of New Deal insiders, long allied with the London Fabian Society and its American offshoots, realized that Keynes’ open letter laid down guidelines for financial policy which the keepers of the United States Treasury would observe for years to come.

In October, the Roosevelt Administration, following the Keynes-inspired example of the British Government, had abandoned the gold standard and adopted the device of a managed currency. To avoid serious fluctuations in the value of the dollar, Keynes now advised the United States Treasury to go into the business of buying and selling bullion. He also stated flatly that a permanent program of government “investment” in public works should be contemplated to supplement the inadequacies of private investment in creating employment. As aids to economic recovery, he recommended higher wages and higher prices—the latter to be achieved through a policy of cheap money and lower interest rates, touched off by lowered interest rates on government loans.

Above all, Keynes warned the President against “that crude economic fallacy known as the quantity theory of money!” This was a delicate way of suggesting that a government’s spending need not be limited to the amount of its income, actual or anticipated. By inference, cheap money could always be borrowed to meet any threatened day-to-day deficits—leaving the long-range Government deficits a mere item of Treasury bookkeeping. In retrospect, it is obvious that every proposal made by Keynes in his open letter was subsequently adopted by the New Deal Administration.

For whatever reason, vast and still vaster sums were “invested” in public works. The United States Treasury proceeded to buy and sell silver as well as gold, at immense cost to taxpayers yet unborn and profit to the knowledgeable few. Through increased gold and silver purchases from Mexico in 1938, the New Deal Administration compensated the Mexican Government almost to the penny for loss of oil royalties incurred as a result of the latter’s expropriation of American and British-owned oil leases and related properties—a maneuver attributed to Keynes’ great friend, Harry Dexter White, then Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

Between 1932 and 1953, “liberal” Democratic Administrations in Washington performed the remarkable feat of borrowing 250 billion dollars at steadily declining rates of interest, accomplished in part by pressure on the banks to absorb ever-larger quantities of government bonds. While each individual bond issue was repaid as it fell due, somehow the total remained on the Government books as an ever-mounting public debt. It was frenzied finance—a prescription for hand-to-mouth government operation, via a system of double entry bookkeeping.

Keynes paid a triumphal visit to the United States in June, 1934, one of numerous visitations. At that time, he was frequently consulted by many key persons in the Government, all eager for his comments and suggestions.(61) According to Secretary Perkins, he pointed out that in every respect the New Deal was doing exactly what his own theories called for. This was not surprising, in view of the fact that Keynes had cooperated closely with the British Fabian Socialist planners of PEP in drafting the preliminary plans for the New Deal, which were transmitted to Roosevelt via Felix Frankfurter, Stuart Chase, Harry Hopkins and Frances Perkins herself. When relief and public works appropriations were cut in 1937, Keynes warned of an economic recession—as did, in fact, occur, though not entirely for the reasons he alleged.

In 1934, Keynes was personally received by President Roosevelt, who wrote to their mutual friend, Felix Frankfurter, “I had a grand talk with K. and liked him immensely.” (62) To Frances Perkins, however, the President confided: “I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigamarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” (63) On the whole, Keynes’ invitation to a higher, wider and handsomer program of government spending proved a pleasant prospect to the President, even if the attempt to justify it mathematically did not. Roosevelt’s own uncomplicated attitude toward money was best revealed in a mock-serious reproof to one of his secretaries who tended to be over-generous in her use of punctuation marks: “Grace, how often must I tell you not to waste the taxpayers’ commas? (64) Dollars or commas, they were much the same to FDR: if anything, he was more averse to wasting commas!

Following his interview at the White House, Keynes took the precaution of stopping in to see Secretary Perkins at the Department of Labor. After remarking ruefully that he had “supposed the President to be more literate, economically speaking,” he rehearsed his famous theory of “the multiplier” in simple terms. The “multiplier” was actually an invention of Richard F. Kahn, (65) one of Keynes’ clever students, which the “master” appropriated as his own.

As reported by Frances Perkins (on whose economic literacy he failed to comment), Keynes said that a dollar spent on relief was a dollar given in turn to the retailer, the wholesaler, and finally to the farmer—which, as any American farmer can testify, never happens! ‘With one dollar,” Secretary Perkins enthused, “you have created four dollars worth of national income!” (66) And she added, “I wish Keynes had been as concrete when he talked to Roosevelt instead of treating him as though he belonged to the higher echelons of economic knowledge!” (67) Keynes shrewdly surmised that Secretary Perkins would convey his simplified explanations to the President. In consequence, Roosevelt soon afterwards requested—and received—a 4 billion dollar appropriation for public works from the Congress.(68)

It was not necessary to be a serious student of Keynes in order to put his preachings into practice. Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board under Roosevelt, for instance, definitely helped to promote policies based on Keynesian economics. These, as Professor Seymour Harris has mentioned approvingly, included: printing-press money, unbalanced budgets, attacks on thrift, a redistribution of national income; all leading to increased production, especially in consumers’ industries, and to a larger volume of retail sales. Yet Eccles himself declared in 1951, “I have never read Keynes’ writings except in small extracts to this day.” (69)

Evidently Eccles derived his ideas from secondary sources, including some of his own assistants who were ardent Keynesians—among them, Lauchlin Currie. It may be useful to observe that Keynes’ views were officially derided by Soviet economists, who declared with unexpected veracity that his recipes could not possibly save capitalism in the long run. Nevertheless, individuals since disclosed as agents of the Soviet conspiracy in Washington, such as Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White, were among the most active promoters of Keynesian measures. That circumstance alone might lead one to suspect his policies did not coincide with the best interests of the United States.

With the appearance in 1936 of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the various anti-depression remedies advanced by Keynes were codified and elevated to the status of an economic doctrine. For its influence on men and events to come, publication of the General Theory has been held comparable only to that of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Despite a difficult style quite unlike Keynes’ lucid journalistic prose, the burden of the work is a simple one. Employing a strange vocabulary and an authoritative manner, the General Theory undertakes to demonstrate that public investment (or government spending) must be indefinitely prolonged to correct the “deficiencies” of private capital.

It is based on two major assumptions, both of Marxist origin and both open to serious question. First, that a government is in duty bound to provide.”full employment” for its citizens: a condition only attained in the past under slave-economies. Second, that periodic slumps are inherent in the “sick” capitalist system. Regular infusions of government aid, therefore, are prescribed to insure a perpetual boom. The cure-all is attractively packaged and easy to swallow, even though the aftertaste may be bitter. If the patient eventually weakens and dies—well, that is bound to happen some day, and by then the hopeful physician will be out of reach. In the long run, as Keynes remarked, not too originally, we are all dead.

For devotees of pure English or uncluttered logic, reading Keynes’ General Theory is a painful experience. The text abounds in such stock terms as “durable consumer goods”—though clearly, nothing consumed can properly be called durable. The word which Keynes used most assiduously, however, and to which he attached the most variable meanings, is a word reminiscent of the stock market speculation: namely, “marginal.” Thus he speaks of “marginal tendency to consume”; the “marginal utility (70) of labor”; the “marginal efficiency of capital,” by which he really means “inefficiency.” All of these singular factors are measured percentage-wise and their effect on the national economy is computed.

“Liquidity preference” is the horrid phrase used by Keynes to describe the normal human impulse to keep some ready cash on hand, instead of spending or investing it at once. This, says Keynes, should be discouraged, because it takes money out of circulation. Saving is equated with hoarding, like the gold in the French peasant’s sock— even though modern savings banks often play a very useful role in private investment. In that Keynesian wonderland of topsy-turvy verbiage and distorted logic, one notes a gradual but implacable trend toward shutting off all the sources which are the lifeblood of private investment—including a campaign to dishearten the long-term investor by ever lower interest rates. Thus, in an artificially stimulated economy, which Keynes visualizes as constantly expanding, the role of private capital must inevitably shrink in proportion to the always more dominant public or government sector, until initiative fails at last and free enterprise gives up the ghost without a struggle.

Though Keynes is usually regarded, quite correctly, as the father of deficit spending, the implications of his General Theory are more far-reaching than the average American who is not “economically literate” might suppose. Public investment—so called because it allegedly reaps dividends in the shape of larger tax returns, even if the original capital outlay is never recovered—involves a great deal more than the mere act of spending.(71) It means “planning” of the nation’s economic life by invisible government planners; it means political supervision of private industry to measure its “social utility” and “efficiency” in providing jobs; it means a manipulated currency, to make certain that real wages do not rise too rapidly and that the only benefit of last week’s wage raise will be a bigger tax deduction. In other words, it means Big and Bigger Government.

Total employment itself calls for higher and higher levels of production, presumably to absorb the labor of a growing population. It means Big Industry and Big Labor, both increasingly subservient to Big Government. Moreover, total employment demands total consumption—that is, continuous and frantic personal spending without thought for the future. Whatever is not spent returns as taxes to the Government, which will care in some fashion for its carefree citizens in old age, sickness and other contingencies. The society evolving from all this combines the philosophy of the grasshopper with the community life of the ant—a synthesis never imagined by LaFontaine, that innocent of the ancien regime!

The revolutionary nature of Keynes’ New Economics was, of course, unnoticed by and unknown to the great American public. Its inner meaning was divulged only to the illumined few and has never to this day been generally acknowledged. Leaders of the international Socialist movement, however, were quick to grasp the point. The first enthusiastic review of Keynes’ General Theory by any professional economist came from the pen of G. D. H. Cole, (72) avowed Marxist, lifelong foe of the profit system and foremost Fabian Socialist doctrinaire of his time.

Whether Keynes himself remained an overt or covert member of the British Fabian Society is a purely academic question. Born, bred and nourished in the Fabian creed, he is not known to have ever forsaken it. Most of his relatives and close friends were openly connected with Fabian Socialist organizations. In 1922, his sister, Helen Keynes, revived the Fabian Educational Group, a “liberal” women’s group founded during World War I. Years later his niece, Polly Hill, became a staff member of the New Fabian Research Bureau, employed at her uncle’s request.

Although Keynes declined to join the New Fabian Research Bureau except as an Associate Member, his refusal caused no rancor and his views on economics were reflected in a majority of the forty-two “solid research pamphlets” published by the Bureau between 1933 and 1938. It was understood that his gesture had been prompted by a desire to avoid compromising his policy-making role as financial adviser to liberal statesmen abroad and Coalition governments at home. For years he continued to draw overflow crowds at lectures sponsored by the London Fabian Society. If he was not formally a member of the Society, he was still its most conspicuous ornament—and most effective secret weapon.

To disarm non-Socialist critics and to convey his true purpose to a Socialist elite, the author of the General Theory described himself blandly as an “economic nationalist.”(73) Though the term mystified many, others recognized it as a reference to the nationalism of Edward Bellamy, early prophet of the cooperative commonwealth, whose novel, Looking Backward, Keynes had read as a boy in Cambridge, England. Memories of the Bellamy Nationalist clubs, America’s first Fabian Socialist-inspired political movement, still survived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Keynes’ influence was to become a potent latter-day force. Elsewhere he stated delicately: “The Republic of my imagination lies on the extreme left of celestial space.” (74)

Keynes’ views on the nationalization of basic industries were more candidly disclosed in a private letter of February 1, 1938, to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There he wrote:

“. . . If I was in your place, I should buy out the utilities at a fair price in every district where the situation was ripe for doing so, and announce that the ultimate ideal was to make this policy nationwide. But elsewhere I would make peace on liberal terms, guaranteeing fair earnings for new investment and a fair basis of valuation in the event of the public taking them over hereafter.”

That there should be no misunderstanding, he added: “I accept the view that durable investment must come increasingly under state direction.” (75)

The system promulgated by Keynes, as even his most loyal disciples admit, was in reality no system at all. It was a rationale and a tool for achieving total political control, at a gradually increased tempo, over the economic life of a nation. Specifically designed to affect public policy, it adapted the once-pedestrian methods of Fabian Socialism to an age of high-powered mass production. More than any other contrivance, Keynes’ New Economics performed the feat of lifting the Fabian tortoise off the back roads and byways, and putting it on a modern freeway in a fast car supplied by its own willing victims.

Many years earlier—back in 1909, when the British Empire was strong enough to enforce peace throughout the world—spokesmen for the Conservative Party of Great Britain had asserted that Fabian Socialists would never be able to achieve their declared aim of nonviolent social revolution—because the free enterprise system would never consent meekly to its own destruction.(76) To that taunt John Maynard Keynes, who became Lord Keynes of Tilton, supplied a delayed but deadly answer. He furnished a formula for the peaceful transition to Socialism and helped mightily to induce the United States, greatest industrial nation on earth, to adopt it as an official policy.

Dealing in broad generalities based on equally broad assumptions, the General Theory was merely a framework to which Keynes’ acolytes and heirs could add such refinements or excrescences as their fancy dictated. It bred a new scholasticism, rather than objective study: for there could be no tampering with the basic concepts. Moreover, the macro-economics of Keynes, being primarily designed to influence public policy, implied that its adepts alone were qualified to plan the economic and fiscal destiny of nations. Thus the keys to the future were delivered into the hands of an intellectual elite trained to interpret the New Economics. This perhaps was the secret of its profound appeal to students and professors of political economy, intoxicated by the vistas of power and influence which their monopoly of the Keynesian technique conferred.

In academic circles the success of the General Theory was prompt and lasting. The young took it up and their elders followed, one of the first “older” economists to promote it being Professor Alvin Hansen of Harvard and the LID. A Keynesian school of thought arose, a close-knit fraternal entity whose members supported and advanced each other professionally. As Harvard Professor A.J. Schumpeter explained, this was a well-organized group professing “allegiance to one master and one doctrine,” with “its propagandists, its watchwords, its esoteric and popular doctrine.” (77) Linked to it was a wider ring of sympathizers in public and private life, and beyond these a still wider ring of persons who had absorbed, consciously or unconsciously, some phases of the Keynesian mystique.

Harvard University, where Keynes lectured in person, appears to have been the first influential center from which those widening smoke rings of modern Fabian Socialist doctrine were wafted. Its glowing core was the Department of Economics which, by affiliation with the School of Business Administration, was even able to extend the Keynesian outlook into the industrial and managerial field. A proud example of this permeation process was Robert S. McNamara, who, after serving as an assistant professor of Business Administration at Harvard from 1940 to 1943 and flying a desk for several years in the Army Air Force, became an executive of the Ford Motor Company— and ultimately civilian czar of the United States Department of Defense. His role, as professional army men have pointed out, was to devise and execute a series of nonmilitary actions for encirclement of the military.

Anyone who studied at a leading American or British university in the middle nineteen-thirties remembers how all at once the whole character of political economy seemed to change; along with such allied subjects as sociology, history and political science. Every previous approach was suddenly found to be outdated, and the New Economics of John Maynard Keynes became the harbinger of a New Social Order. Actually, the New Economics was not quite so new as its name. It borrowed something from Jevons, the nineteenth century Briton applauded in the original Fabian Essays, and much from minor Scandinavian economists engaged in applying a type of Socialism which has been called the Middle Way. The only major economic prophet, however, whose teachings the new doctrine did not wholly contradict, was Karl Marx; for Keynes discreetly left some things unsaid.

Paul Sweezy, known today as a “brilliant” Marxist as well as an ardent Keynesian, still recalls the electric excitement, the tingling sense of power and opportunity unlimited, that swept the campus in his student days.(78) Even a nonprofessional economist like the late John F. Kennedy, who was a Harvard undergraduate in the years when the Keynesian revelation first dawned, could hardly have avoided being impressed by the newly fashionable economic gospel. Many years later, by way of a practical testimonial, President Kennedy invited a number of his old teachers to Washington to aid him in planning policies for the nation and the world. His own talk was rich in such Keynesian catchwords as the gross national product, the balance of payments, and especially National Growth, which seemed vague but full of promise to a largely untutored popular audience.

It is generally agreed today that there is hardly a political economist of prominence in America who—even when he appears critical of Keynes—has not been influenced by the Keynesian method.(79) If he had resisted seriously, it is safe to say he would not be prominent. So strong and widespread is the influence of the Keynesian School, as exerted through the American Economic Society, the American Academy of Political Science, the American Association of University Professors and other respected bodies—not to mention the League for Industrial Democracy and the Americans for Democratic Action.

A graduate student in economics at a major American university who was bold enough to attack the Keynesian method as the intellectual fraud of the century and the product of an inspired charlatan, would be surprised to receive a doctorate—and would probably have difficulty in securing either an academic or government post, or the publishing outlets needed to rise in the profession. So dominant and so exclusive has the New Economics become, that the posthumous authority of Keynes is even greater than it was in his lifetime, when he framed international monetary policy and dictated postwar trade policies for England and the United States.

For some thirty years the New Economics launched by Keynes has been potent political medicine in Washington. Deficit budgets and grandiose spending became the hallmarks not only of the New Deal, but also of its liberally permeated successors, the Fair Deal and the New Frontier. Public “investment” in public works was superseded by Lend-Lease in World War II, to be followed by the multiple forms of foreign aid and civilian-planned defense in the postwar era. A reversion to the early New Deal emphasis on welfare and public works, with some added global overtones, was evident in President Johnson’s first State of the Union message.

One of the questions that appears to have escaped Keynes, as even the faithful Professor Harris admits, was: How high can a national debt rise without resulting in national bankruptcy? (80) Spurred by advice from John Maynard Keynes and macro-economists of the Keynesian School, the architects of the official public debt of the United States caused it to soar to 305 billion dollars by July 1, 1963—some 25 billion dollars more than the combined public debts of the other 112 nations of the world. Yet the Government was still borrowing money to finance a permanent program of foreign aid, on which a substantial part of our domestic production and employment seemed to depend. Even now there are Keynesians in the United States and England who complain that our annual deficits are not high enough to assure prosperity for all!

Although Lord Keynes died peacefully in 1946 and was interred with all the pomp an admiring Labour Party Government in Britain could provide, the mischief he compounded lives on. If his influence was vast during his lifetime, it has been enormously magnified since his death. In the pantheon of Fabian Socialism, even a demigod is not irreplaceable: there are always trained heads and hands prepared to push his theories, with appropriate variations, to their unnatural conclusion.

The cult of national suicide, initiated by Keynes and known as the New Economics, is not only preserved but expanded by his sophisticated followers, operating through the twin channels of politics and higher education with the blessing of the Socialist International. An entire generation of political economists has been reared in Keynes’ image; and Keynesian cliches have become the debased tender of intellectual exchange from Washington and London to Calcutta and Damascus. As The New York Times proclaimed in a banner headline on September 9,1963: “Once revolutionary, the economics of Keynes now is orthodox.”(81)

Almost imperceptibly, John Maynard Keynes became the “prophet of the new radicalism,” as a current spokesman of that radicalism, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has confessed. Since its goals do not differ noticeably from those of the old radicalism, little public mention is made of ultimate aims. The technical expedients for achieving them at ever-accelerated speed are stressed. Thus the methodology of Keynes has inspired a whole series of new high speed techniques and new forms of penetration for effecting a tacit transition to Socialism under the somewhat bewildering conditions of the post World War II atomic era.

Far from being defunct today, the Keynesian approach has become almost unassailable by virtue of time and repetition. The deceptively innocent slogan of “full employment,” for instance, was embodied in a Resolution passed in 1952 by the International Labor Organization in Geneva.(82) The same slogan reappears in the present-day programs of Socialist-directed trade unions and political organizations in the United States.

The Keynesian promise of a perpetual boom maintained through government spending—modern version of the Greek myth of the miraculous pitcher—was dished out as a basis for the Democratic Party’s national election campaign of 1964. In the shape of dazzling and generally unsubstantiated statistics, it has been rewarmed and served up to an uncritical public through popular magazines, (83) daily columnists (84) and news releases from official sources. All presage, often without realizing it, a transition to that Socialist way of life which the London Sunday Times once defined as “competition without prizes, boredom without hope, war without victory and statistics without end.”

The time-honored Fabian Socialist tenet, reaffirmed by Keynes, of indirect rule by an academic elite, was echoed as recently as 1963 in the Godkin Lectures delivered at Harvard by Clark Kerr, President of the University of California. The role of the professor in government, he noted, is no longer confined to Washington, but extends more and more into the fields of state and local administration as well. With the proliferation of the Federal-grant universities, that role seems destined to increase still further. Today, as never before, the campus is being drawn to the city hall and the state capitol. As Dr. Kerr explained it, the politicians need new ideas to meet new problems and the agencies need “expert” advice to handle the old problems. The professor, he asserted, can supply both.

By way of authority, he quoted the concluding sentences of Keynes’ General Theory: “. . . ‘the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by tattle else …. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.’ As for example, the ideas of Keynes.” (85)

Footnotes

1. Frankfurter was a founder and director of the American Civil Liberties Union; a legal counsel for the NAACP. He was also one of the original stockholders and contributors of the New Republic and a member of the board of Survey Associates, publishers of Survey Graphic. Helen Shirley Thomas, Felix Frankfurter: Scholar on the Bench (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960), p. 21.

12. Elizabeth Edwards, The Planners and Bureaucracy (Liverpool, K. R. P. Publications, no date), p. 22. From internal evidence, this pamphlet appears to have been written in the middle nineteen-forties.

17. Ibid., pp. 38-40. Lord Beveridge in his autobiography Power and Influence (New York, The Beechhurst Press, Inc., 1955), p. 181 also states: “one of my first appointments (i.e. to the faculty of the London School) was Hugh Dalton. Another was Harold Laski, urged on me by Graham Wallas to rescue him from an uncomfortable position at Harvard.)

20. Williams, op. cit., p. 210. Labour Party members who signed the Unity Manifesto included Stafford Cripps, Harold Laski, Aneurin Bevan, John Strachey, William Mellor. It was also signed by such leaders of the British Communist Party as Harry Pollitt, William Gallacher, James Maxton, Tom Mann.

28. “The Fabian Social,” Fabian News (June, 1933). This item states: “The Social evening party held at the Livingstone Hall on Thursday, May 4 was very successful. About 200 members and friends assembled and an enjoyable evening was spent. Short speeches were given by Sir Stafford Cripps, K. C. M. P., G. Bernard Shaw, Professor H. J. Laski and S. K. Ratcliffe, the last three having just returned to this country from America.”

31. Mrs. Laski was a well-known advocate of birth control clinics in England.

32. Martin, op. cit., p. 114.

33. Ibid., p. 114.

34. Cf. Articles by J. H. Laski, New Statesman, July 5, 1941 and September 13, 1941.

35. In this letter to President Roosevelt, Laski had expressed gratitude for the “noble appointments” of John Winant and Benjamin V. Cohen, as Winant’s adviser at the U. S. Embassy in London. He had also written: “[It is] exhilarating . . . when you believe that the two nations, after we’ve won, hold the fate of the world in their hands. If liberal America makes England speak the right words and do the right acts, even this may in the end be worth the blood and tears that have been shed.” Martin, op. cit., p. 141.

36. Ibid., p. 141. (Footnote)

37. Cf. President Roosevelt’s Message to Congress of January 6, 1941.

38. Martin, op. cit., pp. 141-142.

39. Apparently this has become a standard Fabian Socialist cliche. “We saw much and learned much,” wrote John Parker in Fabian News for October, 1963, describing a recent Fabian Society tour to Russia which he conducted. A long time member of the Fabian Executive, John Parker has been making “educational” visits to the USSR since 1932, when he accompanied Margaret Cole and the original New Fabian Research Bureau delegation on a study trip.

40. Martin, op. cit., p. 145.

41. On March 25, 1942 Churchill had written Laski: “I certainly should think it very undemocratic if anyone were to try to carry socialism during a party truce without a parliamentary majority.”

42. Martin, op. cit., p. 143.

43. Sherwood, op. cit., pp. 748-749. Sherwood states that Hopkins had with him at the Quebec Conference, which set the stage for the Teheran Conference of 1943, a document that contained the following estimate: “Russia’s post-war position in Europe will be a dominant one. With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to oppose her tremendous military forces. It is true that Great Britain is building up a position in the Mediterranean vis-a-vis Russia that she may find useful in balancing power in Europe. However, even here she may not b able to oppose Russia unless she is otherwise supported.

“The conclusions from the foregoing are obvious. Since Russia is the decisive factor in the war, she must be given every assistance and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship. Likewise, since without question she will dominate Europe on the defeat of the Axis, it is even more essential to develop and maintain the most friendly relations with Russia.

“Finally, the most important factor the United States has to consider in relation to Russia is the prosecution of the war in the Pacific. With Russia as an ally in the war against Japan, the war can be terminated in less time and at less expense in life and resources than if the reverse were the case. Should the war in the Pacific have to be carried on with an unfriendly or negative attitude on the part of Russia, the difficulties will be immeasurably increased and operations might become abortive.

This remarkable document, headed “Russia’s Position,” was alleged to have been quoted from “a very high level United States military strategic estimate.” It reflected with singular fidelity estimates published in the Fabian Socialist New Statesman by that high level nonmilitary expert, Professor H. J. Laski.

47. Cagliostro is best known for having engineered the notorious affair of the Diamond Necklace, in which a Cardinal and a Queen of France were unwittingly entangled. The scandal touched off by that incident rocked the country and helped bring about the end of the monarchy.

48. In an editorial note, The New York Times (Western edition) of September 9, 1963 stated concerning Keynes: “. . . the greatness of his reputation is unassailable.”

49. Dr. Seymour E. Harris worked with Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson on his press campaign and two-day seminars in 1954. He was also a member of his task force on the economy. Harris has served as consultant to a dozen federal departments. As of 1962 he was Senior Consultant to the Secretary of the Treasury and to the Council of Economic Advisors; a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, the Committee on Textile Research, and the Public Advisory Committee on Area Development. Seymour E. Harris, The Economics of the Political Parties, With Special Attention to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. (New York, The Macmillan Co., 1962). Dedication reads: “For Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith,” p. vii Introduction.

70. A term borrowed from Jevons and used as a replacement for the Marxian theory of surplus value.

71. Some followers of Keynes assert that if sufficiently large sums are invested by government, the entire amount will return in taxes–thanks to the operation of the “multiplier.” To date, this phenomenon has not occurred.

81. The New York Times (Western edition), (September 9, 1963). Article by British economist George Schwartz.

82. The Resolution referred to included the following significant sentence: “The Conference draws attention to the possible advantages of an international Convention which would provide for the assumption by Governments to accept full employment as a primary objective of social and economic policy, and to establish or designate appropriate national authorities which would be responsible for studying continuously the evolution of the employment situation and for making recommendations concerning the action to be taken to maintain full employment.” (From a Report on the 34th Conference of the International Labor Organization, by William L. McGrath, Adviser to Charles P. McCormick, Employer Delegate on the United States Delegation, p. 10).

83. See special Report: “$50 Billion Worth of Good News,” Life magazine (January 10, 1964).

84. See nationally syndicated column by Sylvia Porter, published January 23, 1964 in the Riverside, California Daily enterprise.

85. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1963). Chapter III, “The Future of the City of Intellect,” p. 116.

“It may be called by some other name!” Those words run like a refrain through the literature of Fabian Socialism, from the movement’s modest beginnings to the present day. Again and again they recur in the writings and speeches of Fabian publicists, from George Bernard Shaw to Harry W. Laidler (1) to Upton Sinclair to Mark Starr (2) to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Meeting the identical statement so many times over, one can hardly fail to realize that it is a clue to Fabian tactics, past and present. So clear a warning, so frequently repeated, is obviously designed to alert friends of the movement to the stealthy procedure of encroaching Socialism—on the assumption that, like any other oft-announced plan of attack, it will be ignored or discounted by the prospective victims.

In 1932 a seemingly impromptu but in fact carefully researched program for advancing social revolution by peaceful means was called The New Deal. Both the name and the program were first unveiled in a book by Stuart Chase entitled A New Deal. Never very widely circulated and soon conveniently buried, it was meant for a select coterie of prospective public servants—and for the eyes of one man in particular, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For all practical purposes, this volume soon replaced the moderate 1932 platform of the Democratic Party, which pledged thrift and a curb on Federal spending.

Appearing in a critical election year, its publication like that of other books by Stuart Chase was financed by the Twentieth Century Fund, an allegedly educational foundation set up for purposes of “public service” by Edward A. Filene of Boston. Director of the Twentieth Century Fund from 1928 to 1953 was Evans Clark, a former president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and vice president of the League for Industrial Democracy. (3) In 1920 Clark had been employed as Director of Information for Ludwig Martens, the unofficial Soviet ambassador who was expelled for conspiratorial activities. (4) Both Clark and his wife, Freda Kirchwey, (5) long time editor of the leftist weekly, The Nation, were intimates of the British Fabian Socialist and avowed Marxist, Harold Laski, whose articles were featured from time to time in The Nation and whose ideas strongly influenced certain leaders of the incoming administration.

Stuart Chase had graduated from Harvard in 1910 and joined the Fabian Society of London the same year. He was a certified public accountant and an equally certified Socialist, with a flair for popularizing borrowed ideas in a smooth and painless style. In Boston he was one of the circle revolving around Mrs. Glendower Evans, which included Florence Kelley, Louis D. Brandeis and. Upton Sinclair. During World War I he worked from 1917 to 1919 as an official of Wilson’s War Food Administration in Chicago. There he became vice president of the Socialist-sponsored Public Ownership League, an organization dedicated to promoting public ownership of electric power and related industries. Moving to New York, he served as treasurer of the LID, was a frequent lecturer at the Rand School, an editor of the New Republic and a featured contributor to The Nation.

Admittedly, Chase sympathized with the idea of violent revolution as a cure for social ills, holding it to have been absolutely “necessary and inevitable” in Russia. “It may some day be inevitable in this country,” he warned, and added coolly: “I am not seriously alarmed by the sufferings of the creditor class, the trouble which the church is bound to encounter, the restrictions on certain kinds of freedom which must result, nor even by the bloodshed of the transition period. A better economic order is worth a little bloodshed. But I am profoundly disturbed by the technological aspects of this method of solving the problem of distribution in a highly mechanized society such as ours. In the attempt, production might be shattered beyond repair.” (6)

Except as a last resort, Chase did not advise catastrophic action in the United States. In the long run, said he, similar collectivist results could be achieved through national planning, regulation and control by government agencies operating more or less within the framework of the Constitution. To that end, he outlined a broad program—based in part on Sidney Webb’s Labour and the New Social Order and in part on the monetary nostrums of John Maynard Keynes —guaranteed to lead in due time to a nonprofit system. For the next few years, he proposed merely three major steps:

1. A managed currency, to prevent accidental inflation and deflation.

2. Drastic redistribution of the national income, through income and inheritance taxes.

3. A huge program of public works, to become a continuing program especially in the fields of housing and rural electrification.(7)

All three of these prescribed remedies were adopted in 1933, and after, by the Roosevelt Administration, whose program became officially known as the New Deal.

Undeniably, Socialism’s first major, Fabian-planned opportunity in the United States came about through the Democratic Party’s landslide victory in 1932. It followed in the wake of a financial panic of unprecedented severity, provoked by the stock market crash of October, 1929. Few Americans alive today recall that the Great Depression, which somehow lasted longer in America than anywhere else, was a world-wide phenomenon of European origin, touched off by the failure of the Creditanstalt bank in Vienna. Through their contacts with foreign Socialists, American Fabians were able to predict the impending day of doom in the United States with some certitude, and they were prepared to take advantage of it.

Some months before the crash H. Stephen Raushenbush—secretary of the Socialist-fostered committee on coal and giant power—referred to a period of low wages, high prices and general unemployment as if it were already a fact.(8) He viewed the prospect optimistically, saying, “We can see more clearly the function which liberals and socialists—both those who are essentially scholars and students and those who are politicians—can have in changing the social order.”(9) Raushenbush invited young Socialists graduating from college to enter the Government service, especially the Interior and Treasury Departments, as a means of developing techniques and obtaining necessary information for gaining control over private industry. And he asserted confidently: “Within the next ten years we are going to have a chance such as we have not had in the last forty.”(10)

Within the next few years private American investments previously valued at 93 billion dollars shrank to a mere 14 billion dollars. The unemployed in the United States were estimated to number twelve to fourteen million. For the first time in its existence, the nation cried out for a political savior. He descended like a god from the machine and he offered the people something that, with a flash of psychological insight, was cleverly termed “relief.”

As A. Susan Lawrence, M.P.—member of the Fabian Executive and friend of Frances Perkins, Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt —reported at a Livingstone Hall lecture in London: “By one of history’s strangest freaks, the elaborate system of checks and balances devised in the American Constitution, has resulted for the moment at any rate, in the complete personal ascendancy of Franklin Roosevelt.” (11) On that occasion, the chairman was Helen Keynes, sister of the left wing financial oracle, John Maynard Keynes who had contributed so liberally to the strange new fiscal policies of the Roosevelt Administration. Helen Keynes stressed the “supreme importance,” for the “survival of democracy,” of what was happening in the United States. Susan Lawrence dwelt upon the practical opportunities it offered for Socialism and Socialist-led labor groups.

The dramatic emergence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at that precise moment in history was neither as providential nor as fortuitous as it may have seemed to the general public. On the contrary, it had been painstakingly planned and prepared far in advance. Almost twenty years before, as a crisp young Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt had been briefed on the career of Philip Dru, Administrator—that fictional personage who devised a formula for centering power in the administrative branch of government, as a means of imposing sweeping social changes. At least as early as 1920, Roosevelt was marked for future greatness by Philip Dru’s creator, Colonel Edward Mandell House.

It is noteworthy that in a lifetime of political observation Colonel House backed only two candidates for the Presidency. The first had been Woodrow Wilson. The second was Franklin Roosevelt, whose family name and humanitarian pretensions could be counted upon to rally such leftward Progressives of the defunct Bull Moose Party as Senators La Follette, Norris and Hiram Johnson and Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania; while his own record of Democratic Party regularity rendered him acceptable to old-line Democrats. The timely support Roosevelt had given A1 Smith, whose name he placed in nomination at the 1928 Democratic Convention, gained him the governorship of New York and the uncritical good will of Irish and Italian voters throughout the country.

At the same time, Roosevelt’s experiments in “social reform” at Albany, where he appointed former social settlement workers to administer his new unemployment and emergency relief programs, recommended him to professional liberals everywhere. As Governor, he activated the State Employment Service along lines which American Fabians had been urging since the eighteen-nineties and he made other innovations likely to find favor with the leaders of New York City’s garment workers. True, his old classmates at Groton and Harvard—while conceding that Franklin was a gentleman—rated him something less than a mental giant; but even this might be viewed as an advantage in politics, where the too conspicuous exercise of brainpower did not necessarily insure popularity.

To compensate for any possible cerebral shortcomings, he was thoughtfully provided with a “brain trust”’—a term of British Fabian origin—whose traveling expenses to Albany were reputedly paid by the Twentieth Century Fund. Among others, Felix Frankfurter, whom Roosevelt had known ever since the former served on Wilson’s War Labor Policy Board, and such polite former Wilsonian Socialists as Stuart Chase and Fred C. Howe met with the Governor both before and after his nomination as President. Once in office, he could be expected to put into practice plans that Woodrow Wilson had merely been able to foreshadow.

A no less vital factor in the progressive education of the President-select was his energetic and ambitious wife, Eleanor. While Franklin served his country during World War I from a desk in the Navy Department, Eleanor had joined the National Consumers League in New York. (12) Inspired and directed by the Quaker-Marxist, Florence Kelley, (13) the Consumers League was a prime medium through which American Fabians captured the leadership of social reform activities during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Ostensibly it crusaded against sweatshops, child labor and excessive hours of work for women, and lobbied for standards of industrial safety. Many public-spirited citizens were naturally moved to support such worthy and emotionally appealing causes. In fact, Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War under Woodrow Wilson, once served as president of the Consumers League without suspecting its long-range Socialist objectives.

The Consumers League was only the first in a long list of Socialist-inspired organizations with which Eleanor Roosevelt was to affiliate herself during a long and active life. Through it she was introduced to that curious demi-world of social settlement workers, left wing labor organizers and assorted academic, literary and political crusaders that Robert Hunter has described. Their channels of communication extended from Toynbee Hall in London to Hull House in Chicago to the Henry Street Settlement in New York and Hale House in Boston.

Thus Eleanor came to know Lillian Wald, Jane Addams and Frances Perkins who, like Florence Kelley, had spent some years at Hull House. Through these and other new friends, Eleanor Roosevelt met and fraternized with female leaders of the Fabian Society on post-World War I trips to England. She had been educated in England as a girl, and in the nineteen-twenties she had attended and lectured at Fabian Summer Schools there. The genteel, high-minded tone of British Fabian Socialism impressed her, as well as the fact that it had achieved political power in the name and with the support of labor.

After 1921 Eleanor brought two New York organizers of the Women’s Trade Union League—now the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—to see her husband and to tutor him in the theory and background of the trade union movement as they knew it.(14) One was Rose Schneiderman, a red-haired firebrand who had organized the shirtwaist workers in bygone days and who in 1920 became, with Felix Frankfurter, a founder of the Civil Liberties Union and a member of its board of directors.(15) The other was Maude Schwartz, an Anglo-Irish woman, active in the Fabian-led British labor movement for many years before coming to this country.

Both were practicing Socialists, adept at winning converts through heart-appeal rather than dogma. They told their host about the English cooperatives, developed with the help of Socialist trade unions, which had their imitators in some sections of America thanks to the early efforts of James Warbasse. (16) They fired his sympathy with tales of ancient wrongs corrected as a result of union action and stirred his mind with the practical possibilities of an expanded and politicalized trade union movement in America. The seeds they sowed, in the course of various sickroom visits during the early nineteen-twenties, later bore fruit in the National Recovery Act, the purpose of which was not only to raise wages and prices according to a Keynesian formula, but also to foster the growth of labor organizations bound to Roosevelt by ties of personal loyalty.

Never a serious student, Franklin Roosevelt had been accustomed since boyhood to deriving his ideas from conversations with trusted intimates and members of his family circle, while retaining a superficial air of jaunty independence. It was not surprising, therefore, that his mother’s old friend, Colonel House, (17) should have been the very first Fabian planner to perceive that young Franklin was a rare jewel, to be polished, placed in the proper setting and flashed with dazzling effect upon the world at an appropriate moment.

Above all, House recognized that Roosevelt possessed a certain adaptability, both personal and political, which the unbending Woodrow Wilson had lacked. The Squire of Hyde Park—inclined as a young man to look down his nose through his pince-nez at ordinary folk—had succeeded in developing a genial, outgoing personality, marked by high good humor, which would enable him to adjust the most arrant Socialist novelties to the realities of machine politics. “Mr. Sinclair, I cannot go any faster than the people will let me,” he told the admiring Upton Sinclair in an interview soon after his election.(18)

Even an infantile paralysis attack in 1921 that left him a cripple failed to disqualify Franklin Roosevelt for the historic role he had been chosen, possibly unawares, to fill. A fine head, a triumphant smile, and a golden voice on the air, with radio just then becoming a potent political factor, (19) could be deployed to distract popular attention from the fact that he had suffered physical impairment. As Frances Perkins, his devoted associate for many years, pointed out, one political advantage of his infirmity was that it obliged him to suffer bores cheerfully. He could no longer walk away from them, as he had been apt to do in his more impatient youth.

In 1932 Colonel House lived just two blocks from the Roosevelt home on East Sixty-fifth Street in New York City. Early that year, the small gray master-marplot slipped in and out of the Governor’s town house almost ‘daily to proffer advice and tactical suggestions. Despite his advanced age—he was then seventy-four—House still had a national network of politically influential friends who knew what was happening in State politics and could sway the votes of State delegations. And despite his own depression-shrunk fortune, he was said to be one of four men who contributed $10,000 to Roosevelt’s pre-convention campaign. The others were: Jesse I. Straus of Macy’s, who had originally headed the Governor’s emergency relief organization in Albany and who was afterwards named Ambassador to France—a precedent-shattering appointment; William Woodin, who became Roosevelt’s first Secretary of the Treasury; and Frank Walker, later Postmaster General, an anti-Smith Catholic from the Midwest who had just sold a chain of motion picture houses to Paramount and who, like another early Roosevelt backer, Joseph P. Kennedy, enjoyed the confidence of West Coast movie moguls.

In those months, the radical-minded Colonel proclaimed to still solvent Wall Street acquaintances that the capitalist system as they had known it was finished and that Franklin Roosevelt was the man picked by experts to salvage the remains. For services rendered, House was modestly rewarded by being permitted to choose Roosevelt’s first Ambassador to Britain, Judge Robert Worth gingham of Louisville, Kentucky—whose son, Barry gingham, in 1947 became a founding member of the Americans for Democratic Action.(20)

The Colonel’s own days of White House authority were over, never to be revived. Somewhat wistfully, he saw his former guest room privileges and direct telephone wire conferred on younger favorites whose radical bias was as unsuspected by the electorate as his own had been. He had set the stage, however, for a new breed of informal Presidential advisers—more potent, more elusive and more definitely committed to policies of Fabian Socialist origin than any mere Kitchen Cabinet of the past. The extra-constitutional method devised by House for relieving a Chief Executive from the burden of independent decision has become accepted practice today.

Other leading pre-convention strategists were Roosevelt’s former New York State campaign manager, Louis M. Howe, and U.S. Senator Cordell Hull. As a congressman, Hull had written the first Federal Income Tax Law of 1913, as well as the revised Federal Income and Inheritance Tax Laws of 1916–omitting to place a permanent ceiling on either of them. It is unlikely that the homespun statesman from the Tennessee hills ever dreamed that the rather moderate bills he drafted might provide a basis at some future date for a “redistribution of the national income,” as proposed by Fabian Stuart Chase in 1932–and as included since 1918 in the Fabian-dictated program of the British Labour Party. (21) The fact that an old-line southern Democrat had been induced to sponsor the basic legislation so ardently desired by all spokesmen of gradual Socialism was an early and notable example of success for the Fabian technique known as permeation.

Personally conservative but politically regular, Hull was appointed Secretary of State by Roosevelt at a moment when brain trusters did not regard that department as of primary importance to their plans. Just then the sole foreign policy issue that stirred them was the diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia, a project in which American as wel1 as British Fabian Socialists took a lively interest.

As in Britain, this move was described as offering vast foreign trade possibilities—if sufficiently lenient long-term credits could be arranged for the nearly bankrupt Russians. The Soviets’ well-publicized intent to purchase huge quantities of cotton in the southern United States (a promise that came to little) helped win Hull’s consent to the establishment of diplomatic relations with that Ishmael among nations. It was the first outstanding misstep of the Roosevelt Administration in the field of foreign policy.

At a later date—as The New York Times’ well-informed Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, reported—Hull’s authority was repeatedly circumvented by assistants having a direct pipeline to the White House. Many of his policy-making functions were also preempted by specially appointed presidential envoys and by Roosevelt’s preference for acting as his own Secretary of State in crucial negotiations. That type of personal diplomacy, originally commended to Woodrow Wilson by Colonel House and enthusiastically practiced by each succeeding Democratic President, tended to nullify the advisory roles of the Senate and the Cabinet as defined in the Constitution.

Instead, something vaguely resembling the British Privy Council system came into being—the difference being that the Washington version was unsanctioned by custom or law or tradition, and that the identity of the White House counselors was often unknown to the general public and subject to change without notice. If bystanders wondered why Cordell Hull, an old style American in the mold of Andrew Jackson, submitted so long to such indignities, they concluded charitably that he remained at his post some twelve years in order to avert a mass invasion of the State Department by hungry New Dealers and One Worlders—as occurred, in fact, after his retirement.

From the outset, however, Secretary Hull was obliged to tolerate the presence of a select number of Harvard-trained Frankfurter proteges in key State Department positions. On his arrival, Hull found Herbert Feis already ensconced in the economic section. Feis was assisted from 1933 to 1935 by Professor Alvin H. Hansen, public speaker and occasional pamphleteer of the LID, the first of the older Harvard economists to embrace the doctrines of John Maynard Keynes.(22) Alger Hiss, who had begun his career as the law clerk of Supreme Court Justice Holmes, rose to become director of the State Department’s Political Affairs Section and secretary of the Postwar Policy Planning Committee.

Secretary Hull evidently disliked having members of the Frankfurter coterie foisted upon him and managed to divest himself of some from time to time. But, apart from an occasional delaying action engineered by his supporters on Capitol Hill, there was not a great deal he could do to stem the tide of encroaching Socialism—or to discourage its covert Communist beneficiaries.

2.

Soon after his election to the Presidency in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt met privately in Washington with a group that included Felix Frankfurter, Fred C. Howe and some dozen members of Congress. With the notable exception of Congressman Fiorello La Guardia of New York City, the legislators came chiefly from the western states. Strangely enough, they did not belong to the Democratic Party, but styled themselves Progressive Republicans. All had bolted to Roosevelt in 1932 and sought assurances that their aid would be suitably requited.

Politically, they were a hybrid species. The elders among them, Senators George C. Norris of Nebraska and Hiram Johnson of California, dated from the Bull Moose era, as did Frankfurter and Howe. After helping to split the Republican Party in 1912, they threw their weight behind the Wilson Administration. From 1924, they had enjoyed the somewhat eccentric backing of the Conference for Progressive Political Action, precursor of the modern-day Americans for Democratic Action. “Conservation of natural resources” was the high-sounding slogan by which these solons maintained themselves in office and justified their emancipation from such routine concerns as party loyalty. They joined or supported the Public Ownership League of America; (23) nominally a nonpartisan organization,(24) whose perennial secretary and guiding spirit, Carl D. Thompson, was a former national campaign manager and information director of the Socialist Party.(25)

As early as March, 1924, Senator Norris had introduced a bill providing for a nationwide government-operated system of electric power. Admittedly, it was conceived by the Public Ownership League and promoted at a so-called superpower conference held on January 16-17 at the Hotel Hamilton in Washington, D.C. (26) Senator Norris registered at the opening session and addressed the conference, pledging all-out support. A committee was named to assist him in drafting a superpower bill. Heading that committee was Father John A. Ryan, (27) later known as the padre of the New Deal—and once identified by the Washington Star, in a renowned typographical error, as chairman of the “Socialist Action Committee” of the National Catholic Welfare Conference.(28)

The original Federal power bill (S-2790) was a bold one, clearly transcending mere government ownership and distribution of electric power. As Carl Thompson had stated from the first, the purpose of the Public Ownership League was not only to secure public ownership of utilities but also Federal control of railroads, coal and “all industrial forces depending upon electric power for their successful operation.” (29) As if by some process of thought transference, the introduction of America’s first public power bill coincided with a move in England to electrify the railroads, (30) and with proposals initiated by British Fabian Socialists to install the grid system of public power. In Russia, Lenin’s mammoth (and even now only partially completed) scheme for electrification of all Soviet industries and farms under State control had just been announced.

At that date, as might have been expected, the public superpower bill failed on Capitol Hill. So did a subsequent bill (S-2147) of 1926 providing for a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and a joint resolution (SJ-163) the following year—both filed by Senator Norris at the request of the Public Ownership League. By that time, however, the true mastermind of the public ownership movement in America, H. Stephen Raushenbush, second-generation Fabian Socialist and onetime secretary of the LID, had developed a more cautious plan for what he termed “encroaching control” designed to lead to “ultimate abolition of the profit system.”(31) Champions of direct revolutionary action complained that his “Program for the Gradual Socialization of Industry”(32) resembled the formula for achieving chastity a little bit at a time prescribed by Leo Tolstoi in The Kreutzer Sonata. In the booming United States of 1927, both methods appeared equally unlikely to succeed.

The central feature of the Raushenbush program was a government-operated Power Authority, a term he seems to have coined. It was to serve as a “yardstick” for private industry and, by demonstrating superior virtue, lead to the eventual extinction of the private sector. From a book entitled The Public Control of Business by Keezer and May, (33) Raushenbush unearthed a pertinent item, namely, that there appeared to be no constitutional obstacle to the Government’s operating a business or industry, provided such action was declared to be in the public interest. Indeed, as numerous court decisions seemed to confirm, it was easier for the Government to go into business than to “regulate” existing enterprises. That handy loophole, publicized by Stephen Raushenbush, provided the legal sanction for a whole series of business ventures soon to be undertaken by the New Deal Administration—not only in the field of electric power production, but also in housing, rural electrification, farm mortgages and agricultural products, storage, insurance and general banking.

With the onset of the Great Depression, the Public Ownership League’s scheme for a so-called Tennessee Valley Authority was once more revived. This time, however, it was offered on the pretext of providing employment and stimulating recovery. Electric power was not so much as mentioned in Senator Norris’ TVA bill of 1933. Other features were added piecemeal through a series of supplementary bills, until at last the plan emerged full-blown. In March, 1935, David Lilienthal, director of the TVA, finally felt it safe to announce: “These dams are not being built for scenic effect, these millions of dollars are not being spent merely to increase business activities in this area. These dams are power dams, they are being built because they will provide electric power.”(34)

It was not until 1937, however, that the actual scope of the TVA was disclosed to the American public. The assembled blueprint, showing a whole chain of dams linked together under the grid system to form a gigantic nationwide public power complex, (35) closely resembled the original sketch drafted by the Public Ownership League between 1923 and 1925. Both the plan itself and the gradual means by which it was achieved illustrate the strategy of Fabian Socialism more clearly than any other of the numerous schemes which devotees of that revolutionary faith have launched in this country.

Begun on a small local scale, its slow encroachment mirrors the origins and progress of the Fabian Socialist movement in the United States. It would seem, therefore, a coincidence that the first municipally owned power plant in America should have been established in 1896, at a time when British instigators of the American Fabian League were actively promoting municipal ownership of public utilities at home; and that America’s first city-owned electric plant was located in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts (36) home town of Edward Bellamy!

Over a quarter century of patient penetration and permeation was required before the public-power movement was able to entrench itself in the national government, securing the potent aid of Federal tax money. At the time, only a handful of non-Socialist observers discerned the implications. One was The New York Times’ ever-vigilant Arthur Krock. On December 21, 1933, Krock reported that the TVA, “while not very expensive as things go under President Roosevelt,” had spent over forty millions of a fifty million dollar appropriation in less than a year of initial activity. And he commented shrewdly, “It is, even more than NRA or AAA, a social and economic laboratory.” With the great mass of Americans numbed by the hurricane-like effect of the Depression and a Socialist camarilla riding high in Washington, such discreet warning passed largely unnoticed.

The TVA has now been in operation some thirty years, quietly but steadily expanding its empire and accepted almost as a natural phenomenon by a new generation. The ultimate step, total control over all key industries, appears to have been necessarily postponed. But not forever. TVA was and still remains, as Norman Thomas revealed, (37) the enterprise nearest and dearest to the hearts of American Fabian Socialists and the one most central to the accomplishment of their long-range plans for making (and taking) over America.

3.

President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt’s meeting with Felix Frankfurter, Fred C. Howe and Republican Progressives in Congress preceded by only a few months the revival of the Tennessee Valley Authority project, disguised as an anti-depression measure. It was one of the earliest bills to be rubber-stamped for passage under the New Deal, and there is no reason to suppose its intent was unknown to the President. Naturally, its champions wished to be assured in advance of the incoming Executive’s blessing, as well as to be certain they would have a voice in naming officials charged with the administration of TVA and allied programs.

From that meeting of minds, there emerged a novel type of patronage, based more on ideology than constituencies, which for a time baffled political experts and continues to trouble many loyal Democrats today. Several seemingly mysterious Cabinet appointments, announced soon afterwards by Roosevelt, were traceable to recommendations by Republican Progressives. Felix Frankfurter, who had organized the Progressives-for-Roosevelt, became a kind of one-man employment service for placing liberal lawyers and economists in the Executive departments and agencies. The new order of precedence provoked Alfred E. Smith in 1936 to a pained and picturesque outburst. “Who is Ickes?” he cried. “Who is Wallace? Who is Hopkins, and in the name of all that is good and holy, who is Tugwell and where did he blow from? . . . If La Guardia is a Democrat, then I am a Chinaman with a haircut.” (38)

A little field research along the sidewalks of New York might have given A1 Smith a clue. For in 1934, two years after Roosevelt’s election, several persons influential in the formation of the New Deal were listed as teaching at the Rand School of Social Science, which A1 Smith once helped inadvertently to preserve. They were Stuart Chase, Rexford G. Tugwell and Raymond V. Moley.(39) In 1930 and 1931, institutes on unemployment, social insurance and public power had been held at the Rand School to prepare the Socialist faithful for the shape of things to come. The superpower movement, which claimed Governor Smith as a supporter,(40) acted in close understanding with leading British Fabians—as indicated by a letter of November 13, 1930, printed in Fabian News, from the Public Ownership League’s Carl D. Thompson to Alderman A. Emil Davies, later chairman of the London Fabian Society.(41)

It would have shaken quite a few unsuspecting Democrats to know how many major and minor officeholders under the New Deal had been connected for years with organizations pledged to further the programs of Fabian Socialism in America. Such attachments ranged from the Rand School and the League for Industrial Democracy to the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Consumers League, the Public Ownership League, the New School for Social Research, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Government Planning Association, the Public Affairs Council and other social democratic concoctions—up to, and including, the Fabian Society of London. If the great majority of officials who formed the intellectual core of the New Deal were Democrats, in the sense that the average American understood the term, then Al Smith certainly was a “Chinaman with a haircut!”

Of course, Smith must have known that Henry Agard Wallace, the New Deal Secretary of Agriculture who later became Vice President and in 1944 only missed by a phone call becoming a future President, had supported his (Smith’s) candidacy in 1928. Wallace was the son of Henry Cantwell Wallace, a leading Midwestern Republican who had been Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Harding and Coolidge. He was the grandson of still another Henry Wallace, a member of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission. Henry the third, however, was a Republican Progressive who had jumped early aboard the Democratic bandwagon.

As editor of the family newspaper, the Iowa Farmer, young Henry by his articles and speeches helped to carry the traditionally Republican Corn Belt for Franklin Roosevelt. In that campaign Wallace was aided by the Socialist-led National Farmers Council, whose organizer, Ben Marsh, openly supported the aims of the Public Ownership League. (42) For eighteen months before the election Wallace had also been calling for a reduction in the gold content of the dollar, combining the old dream of the Bryan bimetallists with John Maynard Keynes’ seductive vision of a managed currency. Though a country boy, Wallace was not unsophisticated.

While he cultivated a dreamy and mystical air and a friendship with the well-known Irish poet, “A. E.,” who brought news of the Fabian-led British cooperative movement to American farmers,(43) Wallace also had a taste for scientific experiment. In his spare time he had developed a special strain of hybrid corn which made possible higher crop yields. Through its American grain agent, Dr. Joseph Rosen (who had himself crossbred a new and hardy variety of rye seed), the Soviet Government during the nineteen-twenties displayed an interest in Wallace and his hybrid corn experiments.

The communications and transactions that ensued, in turn, aroused Wallace’s friendly interest in what American liberals used to call the Soviet experiment—where a surplus of foodstuffs has never been a political problem. Given the tolerant attitude toward Russian Communism that Wallace took with him to Washington, it is not surprising that the Department of Agriculture became in 1934 under Harold Ware the center of the first identified Communist cell in the United States Government.(44)

By 1936 many sober citizens were inclined to agree with Fabian Socialist Stuart Chase that “Henry Wallace had lifted American agriculture bodily out of the free market system. . . .(45)

Wallace’s chief lieutenant in Agriculture was Rexford Guy Tugwell, another poetaster and rapt observer of the Soviet economy. In 1915, at the age of twenty-four, he had published a Whitmanesque effusion that read:

We begin to see richness as poorness; we begin to dignify toil.

I have dreamed my great dream of their passing,

I have gathered my tools and my charts;

My plans are fashioned and practical;

I shall roll up my sleeves—make America over.

A free verse paraphrase of the Victorian quatrain so popular among early British Fabians, those lines expressed the credo that was to guide Tugwell and his friends through life. “Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?” wrote his Rand School colleague, Stuart Chase, in A New Deal.(46)

Tugwell blew into Washington from the economics department of Columbia University, having previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Washington State. One of the first Socialist-minded economists allowed to translate his theories into government practice, he made the most of the opportunity. There was little in the application of the early New Deal in which Tugwell did not have a finger. Besides abetting Wallace in a forlorn attempt to transform abundance into scarcity by ploughing under crops and killing suckling pigs, Tugwell also sat on the Housing Board, the Surplus Relief Administration, the Public Works Board, the President’s Commercial Policy Committee and other newly created bodies. He fathered the thought, seconded by the President’s Commercial Policy Committee, of grading all industries according to their efficiency and utility and denying tariff protection to those judged a “burden” on the United States.

It was Tugwell who proposed that consumers be represented, in addition to labor unions and employers, on the twenty-seven industry boards to be set up under the National Recovery Act. The object of this seemingly benevolent move was to cut prices and profits, while increasing wages—a prelude to the disappearance of the profit system, which a number of early New Dealers believed to be close at hand. Like some other impatient neo-Fabians, Tugwell was chagrined at the New Deal’s failure to abolish the profit system at once; and like Wallace, he moved leftward with the years. His last fling in public office was as Governor of Puerto Rico from 1945 to 1948, during a period when thousands of islanders were being airlifted via non-scheduled planes to New York City,(47) there to find themselves enrolled on the public welfare and registered as voters for the Communist-line Congressman, Vito Marcantonio.

Hand in hand with Tugwell, two other early New Deal enthusiasts pushed through the scheme for giving consumers’ groups the decisive voice in fixing wages and prices under the National Recovery Act. They were Fred C. Howe and Mary Harriman Rumsey. Still a Fabian Socialist at sixty though calling himself a Progressive, Fred Howe was a relic of the old muckraking era and a veteran member of the League for Industrial Democracy. (48) Named to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), he soon moved to the NRA Consumers Advisory Board where Mary Rumsey flourished. One of the wealthiest women in America, Mary Rumsey was the sister and mentor of W. Averell Harriman, Administrator of the NRA in 1934-35. (49)

An intimate of Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins, Mary Rumsey shared their social outlook, having veered a good deal toward the Left since her debutante days when she founded the Junior League. Frances Perkins described her fondly as “a convinced and advanced liberal.”(50) The Rumsey estate in the fox hunt country near Middleburg, Virginia became a happy hunting ground for spokesmen of cooperative agriculture and nonconformist economics. Mary Rumsey had struck up a close friendship with the Irish poet-economist, “A. E.,” the London Fabian Society’s gift to American farmers; and she was feted in top level Fabian-Labour Party circles on her periodic trips to England. Long a supporter of the National Consumers League (NCL), Mary Rumsey saw to it that the so-called consumers’ representatives appointed to NRA boards were drawn from lists approved by the NCL. A two-to-one vote against industry was normally the result.

Outstanding among the lady politicos who stamped their features and foibles indelibly on the New Deal was Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. A professional social worker, Frances Perkins had been trained at Hull House in Chicago, merely transferring the views and enlarging the contacts acquired there when she moved on to New York. Her first assignment in Albany was as a lobbyist for the National Consumers League and the Women’s Trade Union Council. (51) She specialized in reforms having an emotional appeal for intellectuals and a vote-getting appeal among labor organizations.

As Industrial Commissioner of New York State under Franklin D. Roosevelt, she had imported a promising young LID economist, Paul H. Douglas, from Chicago to draft the Governor’s unemployment and relief program. (52) Commissioner Perkins proved so useful in gaining the support of New York City’s garment workers and other Socialist-led labor bodies, that FDR took her to Washington as the first female Cabinet member in history—an appointment warmly urged by Eleanor Roosevelt, Felix Frankfurter and the fast-fading Colonel House. Her personal influence with the President was exceeded only by that of her bosom friend, Eleanor Roosevelt, and her protégée and fellow social worker, Harry Hopkins. Certainly, her quiet but adroit contribution to the labor politics of the New Deal was highly prized.

Secretary Perkins’ twelve-year tenure in the Department of Labor was marked by an influx of Socialist-recommended economists, analysts, statisticians, investigators and legal experts that to this day has never ceased. They were following the advice of Stephen Raushenbush to infiltrate government offices at every level. Some were so reticent and mouse-like that their entry into the Federal service was tantamount to a disappearing act, and a full-dress congressional investigation would have been required to discover them. One of the more prominent examples, however, was Dr. Isadore Lubin, a lifelong collaborator of the LID, who served his apprenticeship as president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society at Clark and Missouri.(53) Provided with some protective coloration by a recent tour of duty at Brookings Institute, Dr. Lubin was triumphantly ushered into the Department of Labor by Frances Perkins.

There, with immense industry and true Socialist zeal, Lubin reorganized the Bureau of Labor Statistics whence official indices on employment and unemployment still issue, often at moments best calculated to create political effects. Dr. Lubin developed the oracular Consumer Price Index, which remains a constant but invisible factor in the inflationary spiral—although its underlying assumptions have seldom been questioned and never checked. He is one of the few Americans who could claim to have improved on the statistical methods of the British Fabians.

Dr. Lubin’s talents were not restricted to his job as Commissioner of Labor Statistics. In May, 1940, when FDR revived the National Defense Council in the confident anticipation of America’s entry into World War II, (54) the President insisted on naming Sidney Hillman, LID official and president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, as the labor member of that council. Roosevelt asked Secretary Perkins to help her old friend Hillman; so she loaned him Dr. Lubin’s services.

Thereafter, Dr. Lubin became a kind of resident statistician to the White House, incidentally conveying to the President his own and Hillman’s views on preferential aid to Russia. From 1940 Isadore Lubin was “constantly available and incalculably valuable . . . in checking every decimal point” (55) on figures used in the President’s speeches and presentations. Since Lubin’s staff had access to the files and conferences of business people throughout the country, he was also able to keep the White House informed on the most private thoughts of management. A personal note from Lubin to Hopkins in 1941 read:

“I thought you might be interested in the following statements which are the summary of the report of one of my men who attended the recent meeting of the American Management Association….”(56)

Frances Perkins sparked the Administration’s move for nationwide unemployment insurance and old age pensions. At FDR’s request, she headed a behind-the-scenes committee to draft the Social Security Act, whose title was a masterpiece of applied psychology. (57) Like TVA this was a project designed for permanence though pushed through under the impact of the Depression. It was part of a long-range program particularly cherished by the Secretary and her chums. Early in 1933, visitors to the White House reported that Eleanor Roosevelt was urging all and sundry to read a book called Prohibiting Poverty, by Prestonia Mann Martin, then an old lady in semi-retirement but once the angel of the American Fabian League.

Even before his inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt had agreed to take steps toward setting up a system of compulsory social insurance. (58) It reflected proposals which the English Fabian Socialist, Sidney Webb, had written en bloc into the 1918 platform of the British Labour Party and which American Socialists had been urging ever since. In Britain that plan was eventually presented to the electorate as an overall scheme to abolish poverty by fostering dependence on State-operated agencies. Undertaken ten years earlier in America, however, it could not conveniently be offered in package form.

Thus the pattern of the welfare state, which England’s Fabian Socialists (59) frankly describe as “the transition from capitalism to Socialism,” was not immediately revealed to Congress or the public. As in the case of TVA, it unfolded a little at a time, through a series of gradual but cumulative measures. By now the Social Security Act has been expanded to include death benefits, widows’ pensions and some disability features. Its payments are based not upon need but upon “right.” With the addition of public medical care for the aged (which, in Russia at least, helps to speed the demise of elderly pensioners) and eventual bonus payments for childbearing, the cradle-to-grave cycle of public benefactions will be complete.

Although the New Deal’s welfare program was largely derived from British Fabian sources—having been transmitted to this country by American Fabian Socialists and such allies as Father John A. Ryan— Roosevelt chose to regard it as peculiarly his own idea. Not long before his death, he complained to intimates that England’s much touted Beveridge Plan should by rights have been called the Roosevelt Plan. (60) He pointed out that Sir William Beveridge had visited him in Washington in 1934. Like the Fabian leaders of the British Labour Party, FDR never scrupled to use welfare for electioneering purposes. Indeed, he once begged Secretary Perkins and her group to speed their initial work on the Social Security Act, saying he could not otherwise go before the voters in 1936. (61)

The legal difficulties involved in preparing the bill were considerable. There was no precedent for such action in America and no apparent justification for it under the Constitution. Help came, however, from an unexpected quarter. At a dinner party in Washington, Secretary Perkins found herself seated beside Justice Harlan F. Stone, then classed with Brandeis and Cardozo, as a liberal on the Supreme Court Bench. She confided to the Justice that she was trying to work out some plan for social insurance but could discover no way of doing so that would be approved by the Court. Significantly, he whispered to her: “The taxing power of the Federal Government, my dear; the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need!”(62)

So Secretary Perkins advised her committee that the taxing power could be used as a means of building up funds for future unemployment and old age payments. She told no one, except the President, the source of her superior legal wisdom. Yet, somehow, the intelligence so liberally volunteered by Justice Stone ran like quicksilver throughout the Administration, rapidly becoming a part of its operational philosophy. While the propriety of Stone’s conduct may be questioned, his informal words proved more potent than any official opinion he ever penned. They furnished the key to that magic New Deal formula which enabled Roosevelt to remain in office for the rest of his natural life and which was described in a phrase attributed to Harry Hopkins as “tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect!” (63)

To head the new Social Security Administration, which Congress ruled must be bipartisan, Secretary Perkins proposed John Gilbert Winant, former Governor of New Hampshire. He was one of the first important Republicans from the Eastern seaboard to be invited into the New Deal-Fabian Socialist parlor, and he stayed there to the bitter end. A year or two later, after Secretary Perkins had prevailed on Secretary Hull and congressional leaders to support a bill permitting the United States to join the International Labor Organization, she succeeded in having Winant made director of that body.

There the craggy man from the Green Mountains was exposed to the tutelage of such adroit Socialist diplomats of labor as W. Stephen Sanders and Philip Noel-Baker, (64) pillars of the London Fabian Society at Geneva. He displayed so much willingness to learn, that the British Fabian Socialist leader, Harold Laski, finally suggested to President Roosevelt that Winant be appointed wartime Ambassador to the Court of St. James. (65) In this capacity, “Gil” Winant kindly consented to address a Fabian Society Luncheon (66) and entertained the Executive of the British Labour Party at the Embassy well before that party came to power. He allowed the charming but undeniably radical Laski to write speeches for him, recommend reading matter and personal contacts, and generally “set him straight.” (67)

The International Labor Organization ( ILO ), through which Winant was able to attain those social and diplomatic heights, had been set up under the League of Nations charter, pursuant to a resolution introduced by British Fabian-Labour Party delegates at Versailles. Since that time, British Fabian Socialists have played a dominant part in its deliberations, both directly and indirectly via the Socialist International. Through the ILO machinery officials of many countries, who could not afford to be openly linked either with the Fabian Society or the Socialist International, were able to maintain discreet contacts with both. The measure of Secretary Perkins’ prestige in such circles can be inferred from the fact that she was able to get her protégé, “Gil” Winant, elected director.

Surviving the League of Nations that spawned it, the ILO operates today from Geneva under the banner of the United Nations. Labor, government, and “employer” delegates from the Soviet Union and the satellite nations as well as from the so-called free world attend its congresses, where labor and government representatives jointly vote down the representatives of free enterprise with somewhat monotonous regularity. There unheralded spokesmen of the Socialist International and the Cominform can meet and mingle unobtrusively; and there British Fabian Socialists and their allies, Scandinavian, French, Belgian and others, are seen to be in command. For that reason, United States business has refused for several years to send representatives to ILO gatherings. While the actual role of the ILO remains obscure at this point in world history, the suggestion has been made that its Geneva offices may well provide a discreet point of contact between the apparently hostile but mutually complementary Socialist and Communist Internationals. (67a)

There were only two members of Roosevelt’s Cabinet who remained from the first to the last day of his extended reign: Frances Perkins and Harold L. Ickes. Secretary Perkins has told how the President-elect, before moving to Washington, called her to his home on Sixty-fifth Street to apprise her of her new estate. Ushered into his study, she found him talking to a stocky, fair-haired man with the blunt features of a Pennsylvania Dutchman. “Frances, do you know Harold?” asked FDR. That was her introduction to Harold L. Ickes, variously known to historians as the strong man, the hatchet man and the curmudgeon of the New Deal.

If Frances and Harold did not know each other, they had friends in common in Felix Frankfurter, Jane Addams and Paul Douglas. During the campaign—then just passed—Ickes had served on the national committee of the Progressive League, whose chairman was Senator George C. Norris, chief spokesman on Capitol Hill for TVA. The League’s secretary was Fred C. Howe and its national committee included Felix Frankfurter, Henry Wallace and Donald R. Richberg, a former law partner of Ickes and later named counsel for the NRA. Formed in September, 1932,(68) just two months before the national elections, the Progressive League could only have hoped to exert a decisive influence at the polls by attracting so-called independent voters and by splitting the Republican Party through an appeal to its liberal wing. With a Roosevelt landslide seemingly in the offing, the Progressive League was also prepared to snatch the fruits of victory from the triumphant Democrats. It contrived to secure for those “progressive” elements—who had been faithful, in their fashion, to the aims of the London Fabian Society and its provincial offshoots in America(69)—a controlling voice and hand in the new administration.

Harold Ickes, technically a Democrat since 1928, boasted a long and unsuccessful career in progressive politics. A Chicago attorney, scrappy and embittered, he had won scant distinction in his profession. Instead, he made a living of sorts as a fund-raiser and campaign manager for a whole series of defeated “reform” candidates, local and national. He ran the losing mayoralty campaigns of John M. Harlan in 1905 and Professor Charles E. Merriam in 1911. From 1912 to 1914, he was Bull Moose chairman for Cook County. During the next two years he was chairman of the Bull Moose’s organization in Illinois and a member of the Progressive Party’s national committee. In 1920 and 1924 he handled the bids of Senator Hiram Johnson for the Republican Presidential nomination, then backed the elder La Follette in his third-party effort. In 1926 he managed the Illinois campaign of a defeated “independent” Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Since his student days at the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 1897 and took his law degree ten years later, Ickes had been involved with a group of scholarly reformers and academic planners headed by Professor Charles E. Merriam—afterwards a potent figure in the councils of the big tax free foundations. This group read the early publications recommended by the American Fabian League and the London Fabian Society on municipal government, public ownership of public services, and city and national planning. Its leaders conferred solemnly with Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1898 when that oddly matched couple visited Jane Addams in Chicago. Thereafter, on the pretext of battling graft and corruption in government— always a handy issue in Chicago—a number of its members permeated civic and national organizations with a view to promoting Fabian Socialist objectives, but avoided direct identification with the American Socialist Party.

Thus Ickes, from the turn of the century, had been active in the nationwide conservation movement. He helped organize the Illinois League of Municipalities, which after 1917 supported the program of the Public Ownership League. In the natural course of events he came to know Alderman A. Emil Davies, a regular postwar visitor from London who was a charter member of the International Union of Cities as well as an honorary vice president of the Public Ownership League of America. From 1931, Ickes also belonged to an elite corps calling itself the Government Planning Association, (70) which drafted the tentative blueprint for the New Deal in consultation with a Fabian-sponsored group in London known as PEP (Political and Economic Planning ).

Recommended by Senator Hiram Johnson to be chief of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Ickes surprisingly walked away with what left-wingers of his time considered the prize post in the Cabinet. As Secretary of the Interior, he had the major responsibility for coordinating and enforcing the Public Ownership League’s superpower program. Ickes also persuaded Roosevelt to place the huge Public Works Administration under the Interior Department, arguing that he was an old hand at discouraging graft. Thus Ickes had the rare pleasure during his first year as Secretary of being authorized to spend $3,300,000 on public works, then the largest sum ever handed over to any Federal department in peacetime. And it was only the beginning!

Written into the Public Works Act by the Department of the Interior’s legal wizard, Benjamin V. Cohen, was a provision giving “cities, counties, districts and other political subdivisions” a free gift of 30 per cent (later 45 per cent) towards the cost of building publicly operated electric plants. To speed distribution of this largesse, Ickes created a special three-man Power Board to review applications. In 1935, he appointed Carl Thompson, secretary of the Public Ownership League and erstwhile Socialist Party official, to the Power Review Board.71 He named H. Stephen Raushenbush, philosopher of “encroaching Socialism” and chairman of the Socialist-sponsored coal and giant power Committee, to a spot in the Bituminous Coal Division, later making him “coordinator of compliance.” In 1941, Raushenbush was quietly transferred to the Economics and Statistical Branch of the Interior Departments Division of Power, retiring as chief of that strategic service in 1947.(72)

First or last, a rather remarkable array of well-known and lesser known advocates of gradualist Socialism turned up on the Interior Department payroll. Ickes sent Ernest Gruening to Alaska and Robert Morss Lovett to the Virgin Islands—two of many LID notables with whom the Secretary shared his tax-supported good fortune. He put John Collier, who later wrote a pamphlet for the Fabian International Bureau, in charge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, with Felix Cohen of the LID as Assistant Solicitor. Ickes’ own testy speeches and writings, which gained him a reputation for mordant wit and enabled him to wage a one-sided vendetta with the stricken business community of the thirties, were reputedly the work of Saul Padover, an angry young man who in after years became a founding member of the Americans for Democratic Action.(73)

Endowed with the power to allot large chunks of Federal money for public construction in cities and states, Ickes dispatched a small army of scouts from Washington (sometimes referred to as Harold’s Gestapo) to spy out the land. Obviously, they were in a position to exert substantial pressure on city, state and county political organizations, which duly returned the New Deal to office in four successive national elections. It would be naive to suppose that Ickes, an old campaigner tasting the sweets of power at last, failed to take full advantage of his opportunities. Apart from personal loyalty to Roosevelt, Harold loved his job and was determined to make both the New Deal and himself permanent fixtures in Washington. He was the first member of the Cabinet to greet FDR’s suggestion of a third term with eager approval, challenging an unwritten law respected since the days of George Washington.

Nearly a billion dollars from Ickes’ original public works appropriation—and more at later dates—was diverted by President Roosevelt to temporary works-projects, set up to provide direct Federal relief for the nation’s unemployed. (74) As an emergency measure, this unconventional step might be justified by the real and widespread human need existing in 1933. There is evidence, however, that the temporary emergency was unnaturally prolonged by other administration policies which delayed industrial recovery. Three and a half years and six billion dollars later, unemployment relief was still being administered on an emergency basis—with the most vocal pressure groups, organized by Communist unemployed councils, getting a disproportionate share. While consumer industries revived somewhat, mining and manufacturing, which constituted the real strength of the country, declined. It was not until the outbreak of war in Europe, when the United States was called upon to fill military orders for the French and British, that America’s basic industries were finally able to restore production lines on a nationwide scale.

The man whom Roosevelt placed in charge of distributing Federal unemployment relief was one of the oddest bits of human flotsam to be washed up by the Great Depression on the shifting sands of American history. Harry Hopkins was a courtier from the Corn Belt. In later years he had the look of an emaciated scarecrow in a battered gray fedora. His great talent lay in pleasing and impressing just the right people in his chosen sphere. Nominally devoted, during most of his career, to improving the condition of the poor, he escaped as often as possible to the diversions of racetracks, theaters and nightclubs and showed a marked preference for the company of the fashionable, the rich, the powerful (75)—providing they were “liberally” inclined.

No king’s almoner of old ever had access to such resources as were placed at Harry Hopkins’ command, nor more freewheeling liberty of action in dispensing them. Whether it was love of spending, personal ambition, a fanatical devotion to “the Chief,” a Socialist creed, or some strange combination of all these that impelled him, even his best friends agree that patriotism was not his ruling passion. Frances Perkins once described him as “a shrewd man who had become acquainted with a lot of Democratic politicians while administering relief and the WPA.”(76) So well acquainted, indeed, had Hopkins become with them that (though not even an official delegate) he was placed in charge of Roosevelt headquarters at the rigged 1940 Democratic Convention where FDR was nominated for the third time.

The pragmatic principle which guided Harry Hopkins as director of Federal Emergency Relief, afterwards called the Works Progress Administration, was expressed by his principal aide, Aubrey Williams, speaking at a relief conference in Washington: “We must stick together. We must keep our friends in power.” (77) When seeking the approval of a Senate Committee in January, 1939 to his appointment as Secretary of Commerce, Hopkins admitted that statement had been made; but pleaded a man’s right to “one indiscretion. (78) For American Fabian Socialists, as for their comrades in Britain, power was the goal!

Harry Hopkins, who ultimately acquired a degree of personal power second only to the President’s, began his career as a social settlement worker at a salary of $5 per month—and disbursed over $5,000,000 during his first two hours as a Federal official. (79) With a kind of inverse snobbery, he liked to refer to himself as the son of an Iowa harness-maker; though the truth was, the elder Hopkins applied himself for only a few years to that fast-failing trade. While Harry was growing up the family subsisted mainly by selling candy, magazines, soft drinks and sundries to college boys from the nearby Grinnell campus.

As a student at Grinnell College, Hopkins was deeply influenced by two of his teachers, Dr. Edward A. Steiner and Professor Jesse Macy. Dr. Steiner, Austrian-born and a convert from Judaism, had once visited Leo Tolstoi in Russia and written a book about it. At Grinnell, Steiner occupied the chair of Applied Christianity endowed by Elizabeth Rand and held not many years before by Dr. George Herron, original chairman of the American Socialist Party. Professor Macy, who taught one of the first political science courses in America, had spent some time in England during the formative years of the London Fabian Society. He had imbibed its social and economic outlook and regaled his pupils at Grinnell with firsthand recollections of Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

After Hopkins’ graduation, Steiner found an opening for the young man on the staff of a small social settlement house in New York. Though not much attracted to social work as a calling, Harry took the virtually unpaid job because it afforded him a chance to get to the big city.(80) Once there, he stayed and did what was expected of him, moving as rapidly as possible, however, into the administrative realm of organized charity. By 1924 he was Executive Director of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association, which had built up a reserve of $90,000 and which Hopkins left with a deficit of $40,000. (81) His political leanings can be inferred from the fact that he voted the Socialist Party ticket in 1917, and in 1924, like many Socialist intellectuals, went progressive with La Follette. (82)

During the summer of 1928, Hopkins took an expense-paid trip to London to study municipal health administration. This was a field long preempted by British Fabian Socialists operating through the London County Council, and his field trips inevitably brought Hopkins into touch with members of the Fabian Society. To his wife he wrote that he found the British program superior to anything in America. Hopkins’ meteoric rise, that began soon after his return from England, is suggestive of the manner in which the London Society rewards its approved and faithful permeators. From the autumn of 1928, Hopkins came more and more to the attention of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt’s intimates, especially Eleanor Roosevelt, (83) interested as always in the social welfare approach to politics.

In 1931, the merchant prince Jesse I. Straus invited Hopkins to Albany to assist in administering a program of State unemployment relief. A year later Straus withdrew, leaving Hopkins in full charge. At Albany, as later in Washington, Hopkins introduced a species of work relief first suggested in this country by Father John A. Ryan in his so-called Bishops Report and based on proposals made by a Quaker group in England after World War I. Actually, the idea of work relief for the unemployed had been developed in Britain at the turn of the century by Joseph I. Fels, the American soap magnate who joined the London Fabian Society. Fels’ experiments were reported by the American Fabian Socialist, W. D. P. Bliss, (84) in his New Encyclopedia of Social Reform in 1908.

To win approval of New York labor organizations for his work relief scheme, Hopkins was obliged to work closely with Frances Perkins, Industrial Commissioner for the State. In less than two years he supervised expenditures of some 60 million dollars from bond issues, without scandal and with evident benefit to Roosevelt in the campaign of 1932. The new State relief agency received sympathetic press treatment from such Harvard alumni as Heywood Broun, then a popular columnist on the New York World and always a warm friend of Hopkins.

Within a remarkably short time Hopkins had endeared himself permanently to Eleanor Roosevelt, who adopted him into the family and sponsored him in every future endeavor. Soon after being elected to the Presidency, FDR also received an exceptional commendation of Hopkins from Jane Addams, dean of social welfare workers in America. That is how a harness-makers son from Iowa, with a private taste for high living, managed to get to Washington in May, 1933.

There he dispensed a total of nine billion dollars in direct Federal relief over five years, until new laws were finally written and the Works Project Administration was abolished. Though such sums have come to seem almost routine today, at that date they were rated astronomical. Hopkins’ activities as Federal Relief Administrator won the unqualified approval of so ardent a Fabian Socialist as Stuart Chase, who observed hopefully that historians of the future might very well regard Harry Hopkins as one of the world’s greatest administrators.(85)

While it lasted, the WPA was easily the most controversial agency in government, not only because of its informal bookkeeping methods, but because it became a sounding board for much radical propaganda of the period. That was the decade of the so-called Popular Front against Fascism, in which Socialists and Communists throughout the world collaborated openly. In 1934, the eminent British Fabian Socialist and pacifist, Sir Norman Angell, (86) visited Washington and toured the country as a member of “le comite mondiale contre la guerre et le fascisme,” (87) the world-wide Popular Front organization headed by Henri Barbusse, renowned French novelist and identified Communist. Youth, professional and cultural groups were its special targets, and its success was conspicuous in branches of the WPA that catered to such groups.

Some critics were inclined to blame Hopkins’ principal aide, Aubrey Williams for the fact that left wing agitators flourished on WPA time, notably in theater, motion picture, art and waters’ projects. There is evidence, however, that Williams was encouraged by persons more highly placed than himself. Far from being reproved, he was made director of the National Youth Administration. In July, 1941, Williams joined Eleanor Roosevelt, Justice Felix Frankfurter and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish in sponsoring the American Youth Congress at Campobello. (88) This congress was organized on the initiative of the British Fabian Socialist, Betty Shields-Collins, secretary of the London Fabian Society’s Anglo-American group and prewar secretary of the World Youth Congress movement.(89) Prominent at the Campobello rally was the perennially youthful Joseph P. Lash—a particular pet of Eleanor Roosevelt—who had been a leader of the Student League for Industrial Democracy and had also confessed to Young Communist League affiliations.(90)

A dangerous by-product of the tolerance towards Communists which top-level American Fabian Socialists practiced as consistently as their British brethren, was disclosed some years later. After long and painstaking inquiry, the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security concluded that the National Research Project of the WPA had served “as a kind of trapdoor through which underground Communists gained access to the Government” in the middle nineteen-thirties.(91) A number of individuals since identified as Communist agents entered the Federal service through that handy trapdoor, some rising to posts of major responsibility under the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. Transferring from department to department by a kind of mutual aid agreement with like-minded colleagues, they were not only able to supply information but also to affect the policies of government itself. (92)

Eleven persons linked with Communist spy rings were discovered by the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security to have entered the Federal Government via the WPA. An overall total of eighty persons in Federal service, thirty-seven of whom attained posts of high importance, were unmasked by the Subcommittee as connected with Communist spy rings. All were directly or indirectly linked with the group in the WPA. It has since been confirmed that appropriate authorities, up to and including the White House itself, were duly apprised of the facts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; but continued to protect and promote the offenders. (93) As a result, a small but well-placed network of covert Communists in Federal service enjoyed a field day which lasted for years, rising the most secret files with impunity and “sharing all that we have and are” (94) with Soviet Russia.

Incredible as it seems, the lenience that made such things possible originated at the uppermost level of government. Franklin Roosevelt’s personal attitude was revealed when he ignored repeated warnings from FBI and other sources concerning Communists in the U.S. Government. In 1942, in wartime, he blocked removal from merchant ships of radio operators “whose only offense was in being Communist.” (95) The President’s stand was officially conveyed by Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, at a meeting with naval officers on May 19, 1942. According to the minutes of that meeting:

“. . . The Secretary then spoke and said that he held no brief for the activities of the Communist Party; but that the President had stated that, considering the fact that the United States and Russia were allies at this time and that the Communist Party and the United States efforts were now bent towards winning the war, the United States was bound not to disapprove the activities of the Communist Party, and specifically not to disapprove the employment of any radio operator for the sole reason that he was a member of the Communist Party or that he was active in Communist Party affairs. The Secretary further stated that this was an order and must be obeyed without mental reservations.” (96)

Soon afterwards a Naval Intelligence Unit in New York City, set up to control Communist espionage and propaganda, was dissolved by the Bureau of the Budget, (97) which had been transferred from the Treasury to the White House by an historic Executive Order of 1939. Instructions were issued requiring Army Intelligence to destroy its files on Communists, similar to the demand made by Woodrow Wilson after World War I. Only prompt action by members of Congress saved the Army records from destruction in World War II.

If some members of Roosevelt’s wartime Cabinet held no brief for the Presidential policy of being kind to Communists, and if most government officials were either unaware of it or accepted it with mental reservations, the same could not be said for the President’s more intimate circle. FDR’s strict concept of personal loyalty required that any individual whom he fully trusted must see eye to eye with him on matters he considered basic. And once having adopted an idea, he regarded it as peculiarly his own, often forgetting the source from which it came.

Roosevelt believed, for instance, that by giving Stalin everything he asked for during the war, no matter how excessive the request, the proletarian dictator would be bound by some principle of noblesse oblige to cooperate loyally in setting up a postwar world of peace and plenty. How did FDR know this? He had a hunch! And besides, Harry “The Hop” Hopkins had told him so.(98)

This is not to say that Roosevelt was himself a Communist, as has sometimes been loosely suggested. Having been trained and dominated for a good many years by Fabian Socialist advisers, perhaps he simply demonstrated the same protective attitude towards Soviet Russia and its agents as did those British Fabians whose road in the end has always led toward Moscow. Only convinced Fabian Socialists and liberals at the very pinnacle of political power in Washington could do for the Soviet Communists what they were unable to do for themselves, both at home and abroad.

Hitler’s invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941 had aroused intense but mixed emotions among Anglo-American Fabians. If it restored fraternal bonds previously strained by the Stalin-Hitler pact, the joy of feeling together again (99) was shadowed by anxiety for the future of the Soviet Union. As usual, American liberals and progressives, who shunned the Socialist name while faithfully playing the game, echoed the sentiments of their British tutors with a special urgency of their own. They could hardly wait to pour out the products of American industry and skill in defense of the threatened Socialist Fatherland.

On July 27, FDR dispatched Hopkins as his confidential messenger to Stalin with an immediate offer of Lend-Lease aid, even though Soviet Russia was not yet an Ally of the United States. At that time public opinion in America was strongly opposed to this country’s entering the war, and few persons outside the President’s official family realized the extent of his private commitments, not only to Churchill but also to Stalin. Less than a year before, Roosevelt had won election for the third time by virtue of his promise to the mothers and fathers of America: “I am not going to send your sons into any foreign war.” That meant he could not ask the Congress to declare war against the Axis powers, unless the United States were attacked. In such case, as FDR pointed out to intimates, it would no longer be a “foreign” war!

Hard upon Hitler’s invasion of Russia, the New Deal Administration proceeded to exert such diplomatic pressure on Japan as could hardly fail to provoke an open breach. It is interesting to find that Vice President Henry Wallace, by then an outspoken friend of Soviet Russia, took the initiative of writing to his Chief: “I do hope, Mr. President, you will go to the absolute limit in your firmness in dealing with Japan.”(100) By November, 1941, if not before, it was apparent to such informed persons as Harry Hopkins that war in the Pacific would come at the convenience of the Japanese(101)—the only question being where and when. Soviet Russia, it has since been learned from captured Japanese police records, thoughtfully arranged to help bring about the required incident.

Through the intrigues of a Dr. Richard Sorge, Red Army Intelligence operative, Japanese militarists were persuaded, during the summer and fall of 1941, to strike southward at American, French, Dutch and British possessions, instead of northward at Soviet territory. (102) Sorge, a German citizen but a member of the Russian Communist Party, (103) had managed to entrench himself as press attache at the Nazi Embassy in Tokyo. Because his nine-year old spy ring also had contacts with influential and high-ranking Japanese, he succeeded in engineering the desired coup.

On October 15, just a day or two before his arrest in a general police roundup, Sorge was able to radio Moscow that his mission had been accomplished and that Japan would strike to the South. The blow fell at Pearl Harbor on December 7. More than two thousand Americans lost their lives, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was crippled, and the United States became an Ally of Soviet Russia.

Thereafter aid unlimited would flow from America to the Workers’ Fatherland. In a letter of March 7, 1942 to United States war agencies, Roosevelt ordered that priority in munitions be given to the Russians above all other Allies and even above the armed services of the United States. Technically, the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 had stipulated that war materiel could only be sent abroad if the Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff certified it was not required for American military forces. This posed no problem, however, for the Commander-in-chief or his personal Lend-Lease representative, Harry Hopkins. According to Hopkins’ biographer, General George C. Marshall expressed the belief that he originally owed his appointment as Army Chief of Staff to Harry Hopkins. (104)

From beginning to end, it was Hopkins to whom Roosevelt entrusted the task of dispensing weapons, equipment, machinery and raw materials to our overseas Allies on a scale never seen before in history. Comparatively, the amounts that had been expended on the WPA were mere small change. Under the impetus of the war emergency, 60 billion dollars worth of assorted supplies were freely given away, with little if any ever refunded or expected to be. “Let’s forget the silly, foolish old dollar sign!” President Roosevelt gaily told the American people in one of his more famous “fireside chats.”

Of the total, a recorded 11 billion dollars went to Soviet Russia, though the real value has never been accurately assessed. Such munificence not only insured the salvation of the Bolshevik Government, whose pact with Adolf Hitler had touched off World War II. It also made possible those secret postwar stockpiles (105) which enabled the Red Army to annex its Baltic and Balkan neighbors as well as Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany in the years immediately following World War II.

By contrast, only a trickle of warplanes went to Chiang Kai-shek’s China, ostensibly an Ally, whom we should aid, at a time when the capital, Chungking, was being bombed daily, on a twelve-hour schedule. Of the materiel that did reach Chiang Kai-shek, some lacked spare parts and some was unfit for combat use.(106) Hopkins never found time to get to Chungking himself, though he made several trips under almost equally hazardous conditions to London and Moscow. For the most part, he left the mangled details of China aid to his assistant, Lauchlin Currie—later named by Elizabeth Bentley testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security as a “full-fledged member of the Silvermaster [Communist] group” (107) and a prime collaborator of wartime Soviet espionage groups in Washington.

As the undisputed czar of Lend-Lease, operating sometimes with and sometimes without portfolio, Hopkins was in his element. Temperamentally, there was nothing he enjoyed more than spending money, and no one ever had more to spend. Caring little for titles or personal wealth, he was entranced by the perquisites and the sense of power—a point of view that he seems to have shared with many Socialist and Communist leaders.

Warned by the experience of an earlier White House confidant, Colonel House, Hopkins was careful not to overplay his hand. Prudently he described himself as no more than an office boy, and he displayed such intense devotion to the President that newsmen remarked that Hopkins would have jumped off the Washington Monument if FDR had happened to suggest it. Yet in the area of wartime production and distribution, Harry Hopkins was in effect the Deputy President of the United States, a function quite unforeseen by the framers of the Constitution.

In matters of the gravest consequence, he was both intermediary and adviser to the President, making his headquarters at the Executive Mansion and actually residing for several years in the Lincoln bedroom. Chronically ill with a nutritional ailment following an operation for stomach cancer, Hopkins summoned from some mysterious reserve the energy to serve as expediter and hidden persuader for the duration of the war.

Besides the ever present Dr. Isadore Lubin, Hopkins’ own preferred aides included Leon Henderson of the Office of Price Administration and Sidney Hillman and Robert Nathan of the Office of Production Management. (108) Of these, Lubin and Hillman were long time officers of the (Fabian Socialist) LID; while Henderson became a founding member of the postwar Americans for Democratic Action.

At the American Embassy in London, where John Winant reigned and Benjamin V. Cohen acted as wartime counsel, Hopkins could fraternize unseen with top British Fabian Socialists, among them Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security in Churchill’s coalition Cabinet. (109) As early as 1940, Hopkins had written to Roosevelt, ‘We must marshal our complete economic strength for the task of defense,” adding in approved Fabian Socialist vein: “This means that instead of retreating from our social and economic objectives, we should push forward vigorously to abolish poverty from the land.” (110)

It was through Hopkins that the apparently nonpolitical Dr. Vannevar Bush, then Dean of Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, felt constrained to submit his now famous memorandum to the President on new weapons research, notably in the field of atomic fission. Together with Hopkins, Dr. Bush prepared a letter of authorization for FDR’s signature, setting up the organization that led to development of the atom bomb. In conversations at Casablanca during January, 1943, Winston Churchill discussed atomic matters with Roosevelt in Hopkins’ presence. A month later Churchill initiated a lengthy cable correspondence on the subject with Hopkins. The Prime Minister protested because the United States had suddenly ceased pooling information on atomic research with its British Ally. (111)

The reason was that in December, 1942, at a secret laboratory located under the stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field, a team of American scientists had finally succeeded in splitting the atom. At this point the project moved from the research stage into the field of weapon design and construction, under control of the War Department. Dr. Bush spelled out the revised information policy in a memorandum of March 31 to Hopkins, which concluded: “To step beyond it would mean to furnish information on secret military matters to individuals who wish it either because of general interest or because of its application to non-war or postwar matters. To do so would decrease security without advancing the war effort.” (112)

Clearly, Hopkins was one of a very few persons who were conversant from the start with the atom bomb project in America. He was also precisely informed on the policy called for by military security. If he chose to ignore or override such precautions, it could only be attributed either to an incurable lightness of mind or a well developed tendency to favor other interests above those of the United States.

Not until late in 1949 was it definitely proved, on the strength of reliable records and equally reliable United States Army witnesses, that wartime Federal agencies had shipped to Soviet Russia rare chemicals and minerals suitable for use in atomic research, along with miles of alloy tubing and pipe that could be used in construction of an atomic pile. At least three-quarters of a ton of uranium chemicals were found to have been delivered through Lend-Lease channels to Russia in March and June, 1943, and in June, 1944. It was further confirmed that 2.2 pounds of pure uranium was sent from this country to the Soviet Union at a moment when the entire American stock amounted to 4.5 pounds.(113)

Such forbidden items could not possibly have moved through the Lend-Lease pipeline without official United States certificates of release, (114) issued by order of Harry Hopkins. Responsible testimony was given to a committee of Congress indicating that Hopkins was not merely aware of these transactions but took a keen interest in pushing them through. In March, 1943, when information on atomic matters was apparently being withheld from Churchill, an official but apparently purloined map of the Oak Ridge atomic plant and a report on details of its construction went forward to Russia by plane via Great Falls, Montana. Clipped to the documents was a covering letter on White House stationery, signed simply H. H. and addressed to A. I. Mikoyan, then Soviet Deputy of Foreign Trade in charge of Lend-Lease at the receiving end.(115) Here was the supreme example of what Soviet Purchasing Commission employees in New York referred to ironically as Super-Lend-Lease!

The Fabian face cards in the New Deal have been exposed. For the first time in history a program of gradualist Socialism, backed by political power and perpetuated by every trick of applied psychology, was put into effect. Instigated by the foremost brains of the London Society, it was implemented by Fabian Socialist intellectuals and welfare workers in the United States who used many well-meaning or accommodating citizens as unconscious tools. Above all, its leaders had access to the apparently limitless industrial and financial resources of the greatest capitalist nation on earth. Thus the Fabian Socialist movements in America and England moved into a new phase, in which nomenclature did not matter and where dealings between governments were manipulated on instructions from International Socialists in London. Without the combined efforts of highly placed Fabian Socialists both in England and America, the apparently uneasy but none the less recurrent coalition of the Second and Third Internationals could never have come about.

2. Mark Starr, “Cheer Up Comrade cole!” Institute of Social Studies Bulletin, Rand School, (Summer, 1952), p. 68. Starr wrote: “As Socialism, collectivism, public ownership and control become necessary in the United States, they will be adopted in specific instances and cases. It may be called by some other name, but, as in the case of the Tennessee Valley Authority, public ownership will be applied after appropriate discussion and debate if the need is demonstrated; and there will be no quibbling about whether Marx, Stalin or Cole would okay that action.”

3. See Appendix II.

4. According to testimony given in 1952 before the Reece Special Committee of the House of Representatives to Investigate Tax-exempt Foundations.

5. See appendix II. For Freda Kirchwey’s friendship with Laski, see Kingsley Martin, Harold Laski: A Biographical Memoir (New York, The Viking Press, Inc., 1953), p. 128. “Freda Kirchwey, editor of the New York Nation, an old friend . . . whose political opinions had developed similar lines to his own [Laski’s].”

9. Ibid., p. 40. “Yet the problem of government officials is a major problem of immediate socialism. In Germany, after the revolution, the bureaucracy was nationalist and nearly sabotaged the republican government until it had been replaced. One good man with his eyes, ears and wits about him, inside the department–whether it be the Interior where the oil scandal started and the Boulder Dam Bill received most active support, or the Treasury where the taxation scandals breed and the government tax policies originate–can do more to perfect the technique of control over industry than a hundred men outside.”

13. In 1920 Florence Kelley was also president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and after 1921 a vice president of the League for Industrial Democracy.

14. Perkins, op. cit., pp. 30-32.

15. See Appendix IV.

16. See Appendix II.

17. House was responsible for naming young Roosevelt, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to the Advisory Interdepartmental Committee. There Roosevelt’s friendship with Felix Frankfurter, then counsel for the War Labor Policy Board, seems to have begun.

19. In her Livingstone Hall lecture, reported in Fabian News of May, 1934, A. Susan Lawrence, M. P. said that, while the tone of the New York press was comparatively critical, an “American expert” (who was evidently a Briton) had remarked to her: “The Wireless can whip the Press al the time.”

20. See Appendix V.

21. A sharply graduated system of income and inheritance taxes had been advocated by the American Fabian League in the eighteen-nineties. In 1928 it was still a plank in the official program of the American Socialist Party. Members of the Socialist National Campaign Committee, which issued the 1928 handbook containing that program, were listed on the cover as follows: “W. E. Woodward, Norman Thomas, Freda Kirchwey, McAllister Coleman, Paul Blanshard, James O’Neal, Harry Elmer Barnes, James H. Maurer, Lewis Gannett, Victor Berger, Louis Waldman.” All, without exception, have been officers and/or directors of the League for Industrial Democracy.

23. Public Ownership. A Monthly Journal Published by the Public Ownership League of America. Carl D. Thompson, Editor. (Chicago, December, 1923), p. 53. Eleven members of Congress, including Senator Norris and Congressman Fiorello La Guardia, were named as supporting the Public Ownership League. The same journal stated in June, 1935 p. 72: “The Public Ownership League now has some ten or fifteen members of Congress who are also members of the Public Ownership League.”

24. The Call Magazine (July, 1917), p. 7. This magazine, a Socialist publication, described the Public Ownership League as “strictly non-partisan,” and added: “Many noted and prominent members of the Socialist Party, including two members of the present Executive Committee, are members of the League.”

25. The name of Carl D. Thompson appeared on Socialist Party letterheads and campaign leaflets from 1912 to 1916.

26. Public Ownership (February, 1924), pp. 54-55.

27. Ibid. Other members of the committee included: James P. Noonan, International President of the Electrical Workers; Ben Marsh, Executive Secretary of the National Farmers’ Council; Jennie Buell, Michigan State Grange; Charles K. Mohler, consulting engineer, Chicago.

33. Dexter M. Keezer and Stacy May, The Public Control of Business. A Study of Anti-Trust Law Enforcement, Public Interest Regulations, and Government Participation in Business (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1930 edition).

34. Chattanooga News (March 1, 1935).

35. The New York Times (June 6, 1937). “Our Dreams Come True. Our plan for a Public Power System for the United States Slowly but Surely Being Realized,” Public Ownership of Public Utilities (September, 1937).

36. Public Ownership of Public Utilities (September, 1937), p. 76.

37. Norman Thomas, Democratic Socialism: A New Appraisal, (New York, League for Industrial Democracy, 1953), p. 6. “Of recent years the majority of American Socialists have been–I think correctly–insistent that the model for what is socially owned is not the Post Office Department but the Tennessee Valley Authority, with provision for direct representation of workers and consumers on it.”

38. Quoted in the New Republic (September 15, 1958).

39. Rand School Bulletin, 1934-35.

40. Public Ownership (December, 1923), p. 53.

41. Other issues of Fabian News show Davies to have been a frequent visitor to the United States in the nineteen-thirties. His biography in Who’s Who describes him as follows: Alderman and past Chairman of the London County Council; Fellow, Royal Economic Society; former lecturer in Economics, University of Leeds; Member, Permanent Bureau International Union of Cities; Chairman, City and Commercial Investment Trust, London, England. In 1923 his son, Ernest Davies, who succeeded his father on the Fabian Executive, worked for the New York Globe.

42. Public Ownership (February, 1924), p. 55.

43. A. E.’s real name was George William Russell. Born an Orangeman in Lurgan County, Ireland, he discovered Theosophy in 1898 and the Fabian Society soon afterwards. In 1930-31 he spent a year in the United States lecturing on agricultural cooperatives to farmers from Maine to California. In 1934 he made another lecture tour, linking the New Deal’s rural electrification schemes with his own cooperative farm propaganda. He contributed to Commonweal, Catholic World, The Nation, The New Republic, etc. See Biography of Twentieth Century American Authors (New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954).

44. Harold Ware was the son of Communist Ella Reeve Bloor. He had previously been decorated with the Order of Lenin for his work on State farms in the USSR. Members of the original cell included Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, John Abt and Nathaniel Weyl, according to testimony given before the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate judiciary Committee.

47. R. L. Martin, American Aviation (May, 1948). First report of that curious population movement appeared in American Aviation. Its scope and purpose were revealed in a subsequent investigation by the New York World Telegram.

48. See Appendix II.

49. W. Averell Harriman has held many diplomatic and administrative posts under the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. He was Governor of New York from 1955 to 1959. In the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations he has served as Assistant Secretary and Under Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, and finally Roving Ambassador.

56. Ibid., p. 286. (Author’s Note: Isadore Lubin was posted after the war to the United Nations. As U. S. Delegate to the UN Social and Economic Council in 1951, he joined British Socialist delegates in pushing through a resolution to set up the Ad Hoc Committee on Restrictive Business Practices. This would have exposed American firms doing business abroad to surveillance and prosecution by a proposed International Trade Organization operating under the Havana charter which accepted State owned monopolies and cartels as benign. It was not until 1955 that the U. S. Delegation ceased officially to collaborate in this project. As of 1962, Dr. Lubin was listed as Professor of Public Affairs at Rutgers University.)

57. The lengths to which research in Applied Psychology, as a means of molding public opinion, was being carried at that time can be inferred from an article appearing in the Journal of Social Psychology (February, 1934). Written by A. D. Annis and N. C. Meier, it was solemnly entitled: “The Induction of Opinion Through Suggestion, by Means of Planted Content.”

63. Frank R. Kent of the Baltimore Sun claimed Hopkins had made this statement to a mutual friend, Max Gordon, at the Empire racetrack in New York. Hopkins naturally disavowed it.

64. The late Philip Noel-Baker, a recipient of the Socialist-controlled Nobel Peace Prize, was a Quaker who succumbed to the lure of Fabian “peace” propaganda. As a youth he attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and until his death continued to cultivate many friendships in the United States.

66. “Luncheon to the American Ambassador,” Fabian News (October, 1941).

67. Martin, op. cit., pp. 139-141. Following the Allied victory in Europe, Winant served on the European Advisory Council, being himself advised by George F. Kennan and Philip E. Mosely. Winant was later reported to have died a suicide.

67a. In June, 1966 George Meany led an AFL-CIO labor delegation out of the International Labor Organization, because a Polish Communist had been elected that year to head the ILO. Meany had never protested in other years, however, when international Socialists were chosen to fill the same post.

69. Under the heading, “Provincial Societies,” Fabian Society Annual Reports for 1925 through 1930 listed “the league for Industrial Democracy of New York.” Organizations like the Civil Liberties Union, the National Farmers Council, and the Public Ownership League were in turn offshoots of the ISS-LID.

70. Reorganized in 1934 as a quasi-official body, it was later called the National Planning Association.

71. Public Ownership (June, 1935). In 1939-1941 Carl Thompson was employed as a consultant to the Bonneville Power Administration, according to testimony given by its director at hearings before the Subcommittee on Appropriations, 76th Congress, Third Session.

72. Washington Post (January 16, 1947).

73. See Appendix V.

74. Sherwood, op. cit., p. 52.

75. Ibid., p. 5.

76. Perkins, op. cit., p. 128.

77. Williams has been identified as a Communist before congressional committees; but denies this.

78. Sherwood, op. cit., p. 109.

79. Ibid., pp. 23; pp. 44-45.

80. Ibid., pp. 21-22.

81. Ibid., p. 27. (Author’s Note: Hopkins remained some seven years with the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association. As late as September 8, 1932 (ibid., p. 32) he wrote his brother, Lewis, that he was still being carried on the organization’s staff. Robert Sherwood, Hopkins’ biographer and friend, says (ibid., p. 28) that Hopkins greatly increased the Association’s income, principally through the sale of Christmas seals. Soon after Hopkins resigned, a letter from New York City Health Commissioner to The New York Times of June 8, 1932 stated that not one penny of the funds raised form the sale of Christmas seals ever went to the relief of a person with tuberculosis or to an institution for his care. It was subsequently charged that “all its money had been expended for salaries and overhead.”)

82. Ibid., p. 109.

83. Ibid., p. 30. (Author’s Note: Hopkins’ contact with Eleanor Roosevelt was initiated through Dr. John A. Kingsbury of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, who had known Eleanor Roosevelt for years as a co-member of the Association for Labor Legislation. Dr. Kingsbury had befriended Hopkins from the time of the latter’s arrival in New York and had employed him as an assistant. Hopkins subsequently took Dr. Kingsbury to Washington as one of his own assistants on WPA.)

89. Fabian News (November, 1941). In this issue it was announced that Betty Shields-Collins, just returned from America, would lecture November 17 at an International Affairs Group “snack luncheon meeting” on “The U. S. A. and the U. S. S. R.” She was described as “General Secretary to the World Youth Congress Movement until the outbreak of war; has visited America both before the war and since; is secretary to the Society’s Anglo-American group; organized the recent International Youth Rally.”

103. Ibid., (Sorge’s sponsors to the Russian communist Party included Dimitri Z. Manuilsky, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and more recently a representative to the United Nations from the Ukraine.)

104. Sherwood, op. cit., p. 101.

105. Hearings Regarding Shipments of Atomic Materials to the Soviet Union During World War II, House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities (Washington, 1950), U. S. Government Printing Office, pp. 947-950. Testimony of Major General Leslie R. Groves, “I am sure,” said General Groves, “if you would check on the pressure on officers handling all supplies of a military nature during the war, you will find the pressure to give to Russia everything that could be given was not limited to atomic matters. . . . That particular plant was oil refinery equipment, and in my opinion was purely postwar Russian supply, as you know much of it was.”

106. Sherwood, op. cit., p. 406 ff.

107. Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments. Report and Hearings of the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the Committee on the Judiciary, U. S. Senate, 83rd Congress (Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1953, 1954).

108. Sherwood, op. cit., p. 287.

109. Ibid., p. 351. In 1941 Hopkins wrote a cordial note to Herbert Morrison: “I have your tin hat for La Guardia and shall give it to him with your warmest greetings. I much regretted not seeing you and having a discussion over a high-ball. We shall do that yet.”

110. Ibid., p. 180.

111. Ibid., pp. 154-155; 703-704.

112. Ibid., p. 704.

113. Hearings Regarding Shipments of Atomic Materials to the Soviet Union During World War II. Testimony of Major George Racey Jordan, pp. 930 ff.

114. Ibid., p. 90. Major General Leslie R. Groves, in charge of the Manhattan Project, stated there was no way for the Russians to have gotten uranium products in this country “without the support of U. S. authorities in one way or another.”

Despite some disillusioning experiences, the Socialist-inspired American Civil Liberties Union has never to this day ceased its efforts in defense of the catastrophic Left. Such consistent activity in behalf of the militants and expendables of the revolutionary movement has naturally exposed the ACLU to what its friends term “misinterpretation.” During the nineteen-twenties it was occasionally described by opponents as a legal branch of the Communist Party.(1) In 1940, it finally barred “totalitarians” from membership, a decision resulting in the protest-resignation of Dr. Harry F. Ward, its original chairman. At a later date, the ACLU took further steps to neutralize criticism by denouncing as legally untenable the principle of “guilt by association.”

In view of its origins and history, one might reasonably doubt the depth of ACLU devotion to the Flag and the Constitution. It does not necessarily follow, however, that preservation of the Communist Party is the main purpose of the ACLU. In protecting the shock troops of social revolution it has successfully deflected or blunted any incipient attack on the big guns in the rear: the intellectual leaders of the Socialist movement in America, a number of whom served on the original board and national committee, and whose modern counterparts still serve there today.(2)

This tactic of defense in depth has been employed with little or no variation from the experimental beginnings of the ACLU in 1920 to its more smoothly organized operations of the present day. In a tear sheet circulated with its 35th Anniversary appeal, the ACLU outlined its mid-century program as follows:

“Against those indiscriminate federal, state and local measures which, though aimed at Communists, threaten the civil liberties of all Americans; to make an effective civil rights program the law of the land; against both governmental and private pressure group censorship of movies, plays, books, newspapers, magazines, radio and television; to promote fair procedures in court trials, congressional and administrative hearings.”

Acting on the novel premise that good citizens are imperiled whenever sedition is curbed or obscenity is discouraged, the American Civil Liberties Union often finds itself in the position of defending both subversion and pornography on narrowly technical grounds. At the same time, it seeks a broad interpretation of the Constitution in the area of civil rights. In its Annual Report for 1961-62, the organization applauds decisions which underscore the power of the Federal Courts to impose change (3)–power not visibly allotted to the Judiciary by the United States Constitution.

Of late years, the American Civil Liberties Union has also enlarged the range of its propaganda to admit lobbying by approved private pressure groups. Moreover, a certain emphasis on its own highly specialized concept of civil liberties appears to have crept into the field of mass entertainment. Wizard television lawyers, who seldom (if ever) lose a case, dramatically “sell” the ACLU point of view to nationwide audiences without identifying it.

A liberal sampling of its latter-day activities discloses that the ACLU, while extending itself geographically and greatly multiplying its routine tasks, has never veered from its original course. In 1950, the Pittsburgh branch of the ACLU upheld the right of Communists to serve on grand juries.(4) In 1951, the national office announced its intention of challenging all future cases brought under the Smith Act, which required Communist Party officials to register.(5) In 1961, while protesting its opposition to Communism, the organization filed a brief as a friend of the court in the Communist Party’s appeal under the McCarran Internal Security Act.(6)

Public support for repeal of the McCarran Act itself was solicited by the counsel for American Civil Liberties Union in Southern California. Speaking at the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles, he flayed the McCarran Act as being the gravest danger to the Bill of Rights in~the nation’s history.(7)

At about the same time, the chairman of the Marin County chapter —one of twenty-four Civil Liberties branches in California—questioned the legality of a Christmas crib on the courthouse lawn in San Rafael, suggesting it violated the principle of Church-State separation.(8) On the spiritual front, the ACLU’s Niagara Falls chapter also backed a test case in Federal court on behalf of the Black Muslims, who claimed that their “right to practice their religion” was obstructed in Attica State Prison; and the St. Louis ACLU Committee investigated a charge that prisoners were being denied the right to buy anti-religious books and pamphlets.(9) After praising the Supreme Court’s decision which held the nonsectarian Regents’ Prayer in New York schools to be unconstitutional, the ACLU’s Annual Report for 1961-62 predicted: “We are confident that when more sectarian religious practices (in the schools) are brought to the Court’s attention, they . . . will be declared unconstitutional . . . Christmas and Chanukah observance, Bible reading, recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and baccalaureate services.” (10) With the aid of ACLU lawyers, that impious hope has since been fulfilled.

As might also have been predicted, the ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court brief in behalf of Dr. Robert Soblen, the convicted Soviet spy, who for years had headed New York State’s largest public mental health institution. It appealed a Federal District Court decision holding that American-born Herman Marks had forfeited citizenship rights by serving in the Cuban rebel army of Fidel Castro.(11) In February, 1962, it petitioned the Senate’s Post Office and Civil Service Committee to reject an amendment to the postal-rate bill, banning the distribution of Communist propaganda.(12)

While upholding freedom of agitation for Communists and even for crypto-Nazi agents provocateur, the ACLU sought to deny military commanders the right to arm their personnel against the fallacies of Communist propaganda, though the lack of such instruction had caused an undisclosed number of soldiers and junior officers to yield to brainwashing by Chinese Communists during the Korean War. In March, 1962, the civil liberties group submitted a memorandum to the special preparedness committee of the Armed Services Committee, asserting that restriction of free speech for the nation’s military leaders “raises no civil liberties issue.”(13)

Many of the ACLU’s views sooner or later have found expression in political action. On August 17, 1963, for example, members of ACLU college chapters, acting jointly with the Students for Democratic Action, induced the Western States Conference of Young Democrats in Berkeley, California, to pass a resolution calling for repeal of the McCarran Internal Security Act.(14) It is noteworthy that in California alone, branches of the ACLU existed in 1962 at the University of California, California Institute of Technology, Long Beach State College, Los Angeles City College, Los Angeles State College and San Diego State College.(15) These are among the long-term fruits of the organizing Committee on Academic Freedom, one of its most significant and least publicized activities.

The Committee on Academic Freedom was formed in 1924, at a time when teachers and college professors were being urged to express themselves openly about the Sacco-Vanzetti case and to participate in Progressive Political Action. The original statement of the Committee was prepared by Dr. Harry F. Ward, chairman of the ACLU, and Dr. Henry R. Linville, president of the Teachers’ Union. Nominally created to aid teachers and college professors threatened with dismissal for unorthodox views, this committee progressively opened the way for the free and ever freer dissemination of radical ideas in schools and colleges. Through its ties with the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors and various “progressive” educational bodies, it was eventually able to exert a potent influence not only on the formulation of academic policies but on the type of individuals accepted for employment.

By 1938 the members of this committee were described as being “among the outstanding leaders in American education.” (16) The Committee included three college presidents—of Vassar, Wisconsin and Mt. Holyoke. All but one of the group were listed in Who’s Who in America or Who’s Who in New York. A biographical breakdown by Dr. David E. Bunting, Dean of the University of Tampa, revealed that the typical committee member was then fifty-eight years old, had a doctor’s degree, and was a full professor in a major American university. Though economically comfortable, he was not wealthy. Politically, he either voted “independently” or for the Democratic Party. He belonged to at least four organizations espousing a “liberal” point of view, was a member of the Progressive Education Association and (usually) of the American Federation of Teachers. He was the author of at least three books, either on education or branches of the social sciences. Obviously, he was neither an average American nor an ordinary teacher, but a recognized expert in his chosen field, whose opinions were listened to with respect.(17)

What Dr. Bunting failed to mention was that fully half of the Committee’s twenty-eight members were also long time “cooperators” of the League for Industrial Democracy,(18) the key organization for the advancement of Fabian Socialism in America. They subscribed and/or contributed to the publications of the American Council on Public Affairs, which “encouraged properly qualified scholars to give greater attention to the background, analysis and solution of contemporary problems.”(19) Thus social, economic and political views considered acceptable by the League for Industrial Democracy and the American Civil Liberties Union were transmitted indirectly to the nation’s educators, who were “encouraged” to apply them not only as teachers but also in the field of public affairs.

Unobtrusively, the Committee on Academic Freedom in New York, working intimately with the LID-sponsored Council on Public Affairs in Washington, also promoted and accelerated a movement to bring “properly qualified scholars” into Washington, as well as into State and municipal governments—there to steer as far as possible the affairs of the nation. As the British Fabian philosopher, John Atkinson Hobson, had foretold, the university professor would become the secret weapon of Socialist strategy on a broader scale than ever before. The Doctor of Philosophy, with a certified “progressive” and “democratic” outlook, was being groomed to invade the administrative branches of government, no longer singly but en masse.

The specialized meaning concealed in such terms as “progress” and “democracy” was disclosed by Roger Baldwin, chief spokesman for the ACLU, who now addressed himself with increasing frequency to academic audiences. In his book, Civil Liberties and Industrial Conflict, written jointly with C. B. Randall and published by the Harvard University Press, Baldwin admitted frankly that while many persons regarded civil liberties as ends in themselves, he believed them to be “means f or non-violent progress.” (20) Progress, he said, meant “the extension of the control of social institutions by progressively larger classes, until human society ultimately abolishes the violence of class conflict.” (21) If not quite orthodox Marxist doctrine, this was a mere variation on it in terms of the fluid classes existing in American society.

Speaking at the 1936 Spring Conference of the Eastern States Association of Professional Schools for Teachers, Baldwin had also explained that by “progressive” he meant “the forces working for the democratization of industry by extending public ownership and control, which alone will abolish the power of the comparatively few who own the wealth.” (22) “Real democracy,” he stated on another occasion, “means strong trade unions, government regulation of business, ownership by the people of industries that serve the public.” (23)

That, of course, was not at all what “progress” and “democracy” implied to the average American. But Roger Baldwin was no average American, nor were the educators whom he was educating. They belonged to a rapidly expanding, carefully controlled intellectual elite, who by habitually using familiar terms to convey something quite different to each other than these terms meant to the general public, would guide America unawares along the road to that cooperative commonwealth which British Fabians also called Industrial Democracy.

2.

Imitative in matters of basic policy, the League for Industrial Democracy outstripped its British Fabian tutors in techniques of deception. For more than half a century, the Fabian Society of London had solemnly required every member to subscribe to the Basis. When that strange document was finally replaced by a modern constitution, the first line of the latter still read: “The Fabian Society consists of Socialists.” (24)

True, the Society also had its prized semi-undercover collaborators—among others, such personages as Sir William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes, who retained nominal membership in a virtually extinct Liberal Party. Nevertheless, anyone known to belong to the Fabian Society of London or its affiliates could automatically be termed a Socialist.

For reasons of expediency, this relatively forthright practice was abandoned by the Fabian Society’s American counterpart, the LID. Members were not only encouraged to conceal the fact of the LID’s British Fabian inspiration (as though it were a bar sinister) but even to deny publicly that they were Socialists, if in doing so they could more effectively promote Socialist policies. As Upton Sinclair noted, some old-timers were displeased when the organization ceased in 1921 to call itself a Socialist Society.(25) Yet the advantage of that fraudulent gesture became increasingly apparent as individual members of the LID were propelled to eminence in their chosen fields.

Climbers, as well as those who had already arrived, were shielded by the League’s failure to publish annual membership lists. Confronted with evidence that he had once held office in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society or the Students’ League for Industrial Democracy, a public figure often dismissed it blandly as a folly of youth, long since outgrown. That convenient loophole has been employed by such widely disparate characters as Walter Lippmann and Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers union and a vice president of the AFL-CIO; as well as by a number of equal and lesser luminaries. A glance at the record, however, demonstrates that remarkably few of the persons admitted to the League’s charmed circle of social and professional benefits have actually fallen away. The complacent truism, “Join for one year, join for fifty,” has proved to be as true of the League for Industrial Democracy as of its senior partner the London Fabian Society.

In 1943, the League modified its constitution, not solely for reasons of tax exemption but also for the sake of improved wartime camouflage. Its purpose was now asserted to be education for increasing democracy in our economic, political and cultural life. Knowledgeable insiders, of course, understood democracy to mean what Roger Baldwin and others had already defined it to mean. Namely, government regulation of business leading eventually to public ownership and/or control of industry, chiefly accomplished through the pressure and voting power of strong Socialist-controlled unions. Socialism was the “true democracy,” to be attained by anesthesia rather than violence. What final consolidation might mean was another matter, never mentioned. If anyone was deceived by the new terminology, it was only the general public.

Somewhat indiscreetly, however, British Fabians still continued to acknowledge the LID as the leading Socialist society in America. In Fabian Society Annual Reports of 1925-1930, it was even patronizingly referred to as “one of our provincial societies.” As late as 1962, Margaret Cole, while carefully minimizing its importance, recognized the LID to be among the principal overseas affiliates of the Fabian Society.(26) Its value in complementing the plans of British Socialists was indicated by Norman Thomas, head of the American Socialist Party, when he stated in a pamphlet published by the LID in 1953: “Britain’s problems admit no solution on a purely nationalist level.”(27)

Past or present, it thus becomes difficult for the LID to deny its relationship with the leading Socialist Society of Great Britain. Files of Fabian News reveal that for years League members attended or lectured at Fabian Summer Schools. Articles by LID publicists have consistently appeared in Fabian periodicals. When a League official enhanced his prestige by joining the Fabian Society of London, the item was occasionally reported in England, if not in America. Over thirty years ago, for example, Clarence Senior, long a national director of the LID and from 1961 a White House consultant on Latin American affairs, was received into the London Society. Fabian News innocently reported the event in its issue of July, 1929. Lately, however, the Society has refrained from printing the names of American members or even guests, because this tends to brand them ipso facto as Socialists.

To the LID’s 45th Anniversary event, Lady Dorothy Archibald, Fabian Socialist member of the London County Council, sent the following cautious tribute:

“. . . I have come to the conclusion that there are no short cuts to progress, but that the long and arduous road of education is the only certain way. This is the road you have followed for forty-five years and, knowing your country a little, I feel that your work as necessary as the work of the Fabian Society in the country.

“When I was directing a Fabian Summer School this last year, I had the great pleasure of having several young Americans as students. Their contribution to the School was outstanding and I was happy to discover that they were members of the L.I.D.

“It is my profound hope that the field of your work may extend every year so that the younger generation in America may receive an education in real democracy.(28)

“Greetings from Home” on the same occasion included telegrams from Senator Hubert Humphrey and the then Congressman Jacob K. Javits, Harry A. Overstreet, Upton Sinclair, Robert Morss Lovett and the Reverend John Haynes Holmes.(29) Leading all the rest, however, was a wire from Eleanor Roosevelt. As a long-standing “cooperator” and sponsor of the LID, she could hardly have failed to be familiar with its definition of “democracy.” Her message, though confounding to purists in political science, was readily grasped by persons attending the League’s anniversary luncheon. It read:

“I hope you will have a successful conference and will stress the need for making democracy work for all people as a form of government and a way of life.” (30)

To the day of her death, Eleanor Roosevelt supported the League for Industrial Democracy and half a dozen closely related organizations, a fact which she never troubled to conceal. She was introduced to it through her good friends Florence Kelley, Paul Kellogg of Survey magazine and Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement, all of whom served as officers and/or directors of the organization. As her telegram suggests, Eleanor Roosevelt’s attachment to the LID was based on practical as well as idealistic considerations.

Through another close friend and early social worker, Frances Perkins, who had served as Governor Roosevelt’s New York State’s Commissioner of Labor, Eleanor Roosevelt was well informed about the potential ability of the needle trades unions in New York City to deliver the margin of victory in State elections. Top officials of both the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union served routinely as officers and directors of the LID. Delegates to the 1944 Democratic Party convention in Chicago still recall the cryptic remark attributed at that time to Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “Clear it with Sidney.” Sidney, of course, was Sidney Hillman, then president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.

Survivors of the Roosevelt era will also remember Joseph Lash, a controversial young protégée of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she invited occasionally to the White House and aided in obtaining a military commission during World War II. Few are aware, however, that Joe Lash was a leader of the Students’ League for Industrial Democracy (31) (SLID) in the nineteen-thirties, when it boasted over a hundred chapters and collaborated with Communist-led youth groups. It published a magazine called Revolt, later known as The Students’ Outlook. Nominally, SLID was working for “peace.” To that end, it opposed Reserve Officers Training Corps drill in high schools and colleges and urged severe limitations on military preparedness.

In those years the Students’ League also urged its members to aid professed anti-fascist movements in Europe and agitated actively in favor of what it termed “civil rights” for American strikers. Student chapters assisted the LID Emergency Committee for Strikers’ Relief, whose chairman was Norman Thomas and whose secretary was theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, with John Herling, present-day labor columnist for the Washington Daily News, serving as their assistant.(32)

Among the more promising junior Leaguers of that day were two sons of an old-fashioned Marxian Socialist of German extraction who had settled in the American Midwest. The boys were Walter and Victor Reuther, potent names in American labor today. As president in 1932 of the SLID chapter at Wayne University, red-haired Walter led a student delegation on the picket line at the Briggs Body plant in Detroit. In 1933, the two eager young Socialists spent a summer running errands for the anti-Hitler underground in Germany and then were employed for about eighteen months at the Ford automobile plant in Soviet Russia, sending back glowing reports on the Workers’ Fatherland.

Schooled in the newer techniques for capturing union leadership, Walter and Victor returned home in time to help lead the Automobile Workers Industrial Union (originally a part of the Red trade-union apparatus) into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The reorganized and expanded mass union, known as the United Automobile Workers union (33) ( UAW), subsequently ejected the better known Communists from its midst; and control of that increasingly powerful labor body passed into Socialist hands. The only difficulty then was and still is that no one has ever been sure how many of those undercover Socialists still remained Communists at heart.(34)

The maneuver was not generally understood at the time, and is less understood today. When it became obvious even to the Communists that American working people would not accept Communist direction, but might follow social democratic leaders as long as they did not frankly call themselves Socialists, younger men carefully trained for such a contingency took over. The Reuther brothers, who always had a foot in the Socialist camp, were ideally prepared for the role. They have been long time collaborators and directors of the adult League for Industrial Democracy and at present hold membership in a number of its loftier latter-day offshoots.

From 1933, SLID cooperated with various “direct action” youth groups and in 1835 merged openly with them to form the American Student Union (ASU). According to Mina Weisenberg, a historian and director of the LID, the ASU “became [sic] deeply infiltrated with Communists.” After five years, the Students’ League split away, not because it had any real quarrel with the Marxist philosophy of its associates, but because—as Mina Weisenberg states—it found some difficulty in justifying the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland.

Owing to the red cloud which had dimmed its name, SLID did not publicly reestablish its college chapters until after World War II. The paid staff then included James E. Youngdahl, a nephew of the liberal Republican Washington jurist who dismissed the Owen Lattimore case, and James Farmer,(35) who went on to become national director of the Negro Council on Racial Equality (CORE). It was not until 1947 that the Students’ League took the precaution of barring known Communists from membership. Throughout the entire decade of the nineteen-forties, however, a six-week summer course, resembling certain Fabian Summer Schools in England, was held annually by the League for Industrial Democracy, to train young college people for organizing and for other union work.

According to official League historians, SLID had allegedly acted against the advice of the senior body, when it merged with the National Student Union in 1935 and for five years appeared to have severed its connection with the adult LID. Actually, SLID members were only following the example of their elders, many of whom drifted farther and farther leftward during the same period—as their Fabian counterparts in Britain were likewise doing in the nineteen-thirties. A singular predilection for Communists was evinced in that era of the united front. It was confirmed by the fact that many high ranking LID officials lent their names to organizations and committees since identified as Communist controlled.

The very amiable Robert Morss Lovett, who personally aided the National Student Union in his final years as president of the League, (36) is alleged to have held membership during his lifetime in some fifty Communist front organizations. A. Philip Randolph, long time LID official and a Socialist leader in the present-day agitation for Negro civil rights, has been connected with numerous organizations (or their ad hoc committee offshoots) which were cited as Communist fronts by Federal authorities and/or state or territorial investigating committees.(37)

In the cloud cuckoo-land of Fabian Socialism’s many cooperative ventures, individuals later cited in connection with Soviet espionage were also recruited, among others, Frederick Vanderbilt Field.

Undeniably united front activities, in which Communists, Socialists and an undetermined number of innocents were involved, flourished in America as in Britain prior to the outbreak of World War II. By some irony of fate, however, it proved a saving grace for the LID that certain outstanding figures in its New York City chapter decided at the same time to champion the cause of the exiled and subsequently murdered Leon Trotsky. This very vocal group included John Dewey, professor of Philosophy at Columbia University; Sidney Hook chairman of the department of Philosophy at New York University; officials of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU); editors of the Social Democratic New Leader, and others. By virtue of being anti-Stalinist, they were presumed to be anti-Marxist and pro-American. As late as 1952, some of them were regarded as allies and editorial outlets by supporters of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. Once again, as in the bygone twenties, the LID was able to sidestep unwelcome notoriety and avoid being stigmatized as the effective leadership group of international Socialism in America.

The radical nature of the League for Industrial Democracy should have been obvious from the start, since its original officers and directors included such well-known early Socialist Party leaders as Morris Hillquit, August Claessens and Eugene V. Debs. In the 1924 national elections, however, the majority of LID members and friends promoted the Conference for Progressive Political Action and supported the Presidential candidacy of Senator Robert M. La Follette. Since 1928, they have thrown their weight behind the Democratic Party’s top candidate in New York State, and, from 1936, they have done the same for the national ticket. Nevertheless, the Socialist Party continued to run a nominal candidate for the Presidency, who was invariably a permanent officer of the LID.

In six national elections, that token candidate was Norman Thomas, a former Protestant clergyman, who had once headed the LID student chapter at Princeton. A native American of Anglo-Saxon stock, Thomas possessed a mellow voice, a booming laugh, and a sophisticated low-pressure approach which proved highly attractive to educators and professionals. While he never entertained the faintest hope of being elected, Thomas had reasons for keeping his name on the ballot. Among other things, his position as titular head of the Socialist Party carried with it the right of representation in the Fabian-dominated Socialist International.

Until his “retirement” in 1962, it was usually Norman Thomas who headed United States delegations to congresses of the Socialist International, and transmitted the ensuing directives to interested groups in the United States. The “restatement” of Socialist aims emerging from the International’s Frankfurt Congress in 1951—which found expression in the New Fabian Essays in Britain—was duly interpreted for Americans by Norman Thomas in a significant pamphlet entitled Democratic Socialism. Published in 1953 by the LID, his statement served as a lodestar for all domestic Fabian Socialists, avowed or unavowed.

For the edification of any innocents who still persist in regarding Norman Thomas as a true-blue American, distinguished for his apparently selfless advocacy of a broad program of social reform, (38) it may be noted that he declared in this pamphlet:

“My definition of modern socialism . . . accords with the socialist statement on ‘Aims and Tasks’ which was adopted by the Congress of Socialist Parties at Frankfurt, Germany, in 1951. It closely parallels ‘Socialism, a New Statement of Principles,’ presented in 1952 by the British Socialist Union.(39)

Like the British comrades, Thomas frankly advocated “the social ownership of such key industries as steel”—while “refusing to discuss democratic socialism in such misleading terms as total social ownership vs. total private ownership.” (40) He explained that some followers of Karl Marx—for example, Karl Kautsky—”never insisted on the need for social ownership of all means of production and distribution.” (41) Neither, as a matter of fact, did the Fabian Basis. The Machiavellian foresight of Sidney Webb, disclosed long before in Labor and the New Social Order, was tacitly reflected in Thomas’ declaration:

“. . . We have learned that it is possible to a degree not anticipated by most earlier Socialists to impose desirable social controls on privately owned enterprises by the development of social planning, by proper taxation and labor legislation, and by the growth of powerful labor organizations.”

Still more significantly, Thomas added:

“For some years American Socialists have been fairly well agreed that ‘social ownership should be extended to the commanding heights’ of our economy which include our natural resources, our system of money, banking and credit, and certain basic industries and services …. I have already argued the specific reason for public ownership of the steel industry. It meets all the tests which I have earlier suggested.” (42)

An identical program for Britain was urged at virtually the same time by the late Parliamentary Leader of the British Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, in Fabian Tract No. 300, Socialism and Nationalisation. (43) It has since been reaffirmed by his successor, Harold Wilson, who pledged himself to carry out the policies of Gaitskell.

In defining the relationship of “Democratic Socialism” to Communism, Norman Thomas made a plea for “non-orthodox” Marxism— especially in the United States, where “we still have a middle class in a true economic sense, while those who think of themselves as belonging to the middle class are even more numerous.”(44) Pointedly, he criticized Russian Communism as being “a betrayal of Socialism” and a subversion of true Marxism. He condemned “statism” and questioned “the necessity of a dictatorial elite in Russia”—without referring to the invisible Socialist elite in America that proposed to utilize the outward forms of democracy in order to impose a gradually frightening system of centralized controls. While deploring Soviet deceit and violence, at no point did Thomas recommend hostility towards Communism.(45) “Other associations of men,” said Thomas, improving on the Natural Law, “have an inherent right to exist.” (46)

Conscious, however, of the adverse effect which identification with an unpopular cause might have on Socialists in America, Thomas uttered a clear warning to followers and friends. Russian Communism, said he, “in its march to power has so successfully claimed Marx for its own, it has so persuaded men that Lenin and Stalin are the true successors of Karl Marx, that the socialist who rests his case upon Marx, as upon a Bible, has to fight an uphill battle. Marxist orthodoxy does not give the democratic socialist the best vantage point for his struggle.”(47) Almost verbatim, Thomas echoed the sentiments expressed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels during their lifetime, concerning the most effective way to social revolution in the United States.

Through Norman Thomas the past and present leaders of international Socialism spoke to the New World. Thus the importance of his remarks cannot be measured in terms of the trifling vote which he commanded as the American Socialist Party’s candidate. One apparent reason for keeping that Party alive has been to mislead the American public as to the true strength of the Socialist movement in the United States, by conveying the impression it is far too tiny to represent a serious threat. Even Thomas himself admitted as recently as July 13, 1963, in a television interview with Paul Coates carried over California stations, that Socialists in this country who do not vote for the Socialist Party “have usually found it better to vote Democrat.” Many are so-called independents, committed to a program rather than a party, who forever tease aspiring Republicans with the hope they can be wooed and won.

Nor should the influence of Thomas’ statement be gauged by the limited size of the League for Industrial Democracy, which circulated the pamphlet. While the official membership of the adult LID never claimed more than four or five thousand at any time, like the Fabian Society it was a pilot organization, whose members already commanded the heights in many sectors of American life—political, educational, religious, trades union and cultural. Bishop Francis J. McConnell, for example, a former president of the Federal Council of Churches,(48) who signed the so-called Bankers’ Report of 1933 advocating recognition of Soviet Russia, was long a vice president of the League.

As vice president of Union Theological Seminary, the patriarchal Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr had also helped to shape the social thinking of generations of young seminarians. Former president of the LID New York chapter and former treasurer and board member of the national body, Niebuhr probably lent his name to more Socialist-inspired committees and organizations than any other living American. Nor did age diminish the old master’s skill in attracting highly placed sympathizers. As late as September, 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy announced that one of the ten books he would take with him, if going to the moon, would be Reinhold Niebuhr’s book with the oddly Manichean title, Children of Light and Children of Darkness—an unusual choice for a Catholic! (49)

In the field of labor, the League’s officers and national directors have included some of the most commanding figures in recent industrial union history: among others, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers; Jacob Potofsky of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers; Walter Reuther of the Automobile Workers; Arthur J. Hayes of the Machinists; James Carey, erstwhile head of the Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers; A. Philip Randolph of the Pullman Car Porters; and Boris Shishkin, former educational director of the American Federation of Labor. (50) William Green and his more liberal successor, George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO and recipient of a League award, seldom ventured to refuse an invitation to address LID conferences. While LID control of trade union machinery was not all-embracing, and was certainly far less obvious, than that of the Fabian Society in Britain, at least it provided a firm base of political and financial support for internationally derived Socialist programs in several key electoral states, notably New York New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

A small galaxy of United States Senators has been listed among the LID veteran collaborators. That senior legislative group includes: Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, Wayne Morse of Oregon, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the late Richard Neuberger and his widow, Maurine Neuberger of Oregon, the late Herbert Lehman of New York, and Jacob K. Javits, who as a congressman was for years a regular and applauded speaker at League conferences. It was Senator Lehman, however, who distinguished himself at the League’s 45th Anniversary symposium on “Freedom and the Welfare State” by saying:

“A hundred and seventy years ago the welfare state concept was translated into the basic law of this land by the founders of the republic …. The founding fathers were the ones who really originated the welfare state.” (51)

An astounding misuse of the measured phrase in the Preamble to the Constitution, “to create a more perfect union and to promote the general welfare”—all the more so, because the definition of “welfare” has suffered several changes since 1787!

The weight exerted to this day by individual LID members and their trainees in education, government administration, the United Nations, and the private “research” foundations, is subject matter for separate study. A whole chain of interlocking organizations, aspiring to mold the outlook of public opinion makers and to draft the policies of United States Government agencies, has quietly come into being, each with a solid core of LID elder statesmen and their younger disciples. By no means have all of the League’s tried and true supporters found it necessary to choose “the hard way.”

In adapting the tactics and programs of British Fabianism to our native scene, the small, once struggling and always reticent League for Industrial Democracy fulfilled its mission of penetrating and permeating the fabric of American life. Its peculiarity stemmed from the fact that it was from first to last a Socialist creation. Although the accent might be American, its voice was the voice of international Socialism controlled by British Fabians.

3.

The surprising thing is that anyone should ever have doubted the Socialist intentions of the officers, members and conscious collaborators of the League for Industrial Democracy. Successive presidents, from Robert Morss Lovett to Nathaniel M. Minkoff, have made no secret of their radical beliefs. There was the venerable philosopher John Dewey, father of Progressive Education, who was said to have inherited the pragmatic mantle of William James, yet permitted himself to be identified with the Trotskyite or Lovestoneite wing of American Marxism.

Next president of the LID was Elizabeth Gilman, wealthy and socially prominent spinster, a leader of the Urban League and perennial chairman of the Socialist Party in Maryland. She was followed by Bjaarne Braatoy, former professor of Government at Haverford College, who served in the World War II Office of Strategic Services, working intimately all the while with the Fabian International Bureau. At war’s end he was employed as tutor and “technical assistant” to the German Social Democratic Party and thereafter became world chairman of the Fabian-dominated Socialist International.

Not least, there was Mark Starr, British-born and Fabian-bred, a pet pupil of G. D. H. and Margaret Cole. For some thirty years he proved to be a strong, indisputable link between the New Fabian Research Bureau in London, where the modern leadership of the Fabian Society was centered, and the Fabian Socialist movement in the United States. No product of ivied halls, Mark Starr nevertheless became president and board chairman of the foremost society of intellectual Socialists in America. From 1935 to 1961 he also served as educational director of the ILGWU—perhaps the most internationally minded labor union in America, with a membership of 450,000 and declared assets of some 425 million dollars (as of June, 1962).

Through Mark Starr, the G. D. H. Cole brand of Marxism tinged with Syndicalism was transmitted to a potent sector of American labor. It was Starr who institutionalized a good many of the Coles’ special ideas on labor politics, labor education and politico-labor research in the United States. As late as 1952, he asserted that education for the abolition of private profit was the prime purpose of all education.(52) In 1949, according to a report issued over his own signature by the ILGWU educational department, Mark Starr “wrote Labour Politics in the U.S.A. for the British Fabian Society, and a pamphlet for the United World Federalists.” (53) Published by the Fabian Society-Victor Gollancz in England, Labour Politics in the U.S.A. was issued as a fifty-six page pamphlet by the LID.

Son of a miner, Mark Starr had worked in the coal mines as a boy and served during World War I as local officer of the South Wales Miners Federation. Referring to his origins, Starr remarked many years later in a personal letter that if he had not been a radical, he “would have been a moron.” Possibly this view was colored by the fact that from the age of fourteen he was educated at Fabian-operated workers’ schools and the London Labour College.

Before emigrating to America in 1928, Starr was for seven years a division officer of the National Council of Labour Colleges in Britain. He belonged to the little Independent Labour Party, headed by some of the more stridently left wing Fabians and openly sympathetic to the Communist cause. During that period he was also associated with Margaret Cole—a founder of New Fabian Research who was elected president of the Fabian Society in 1963 and who took a lively interest in promoting a species of Socialist indoctrination for working people broadly termed “further education.” (54)

On reaching New York, Starr was promptly hired to teach at Brookwood Labor College, which between 1925 and 1928 had received an outright grant of $74,227 from the Garland Fund.(55) Soon he was placed in charge of Brookwood extension courses. Despite his own very sketchy academic background, in 1941 Starr became vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1944, he was appointed labor consultant to the Office of War Information, whose Director, Elmer Davis, was once a fellow director of the LID.(56) By that time, of course, Starr had taken out American citizenship— though he preferred to consider himself a “citizen of the world”—and in March, 1949, organized an ILGWU symposium on “World Government.”(57)

In 1948, President Truman named Mark Starr to the United States Advisory Commission on Educational Exchange, where he remained until 1952. This commission was authorized under Public Act 402 to advise the State Department and the Congress on the operation of information centers and libraries maintained by the United States Government in foreign countries, as well as on the exchange of students and technical experts. In June, 1949, Starr headed the U.S. delegation to the first Adult Education Conference organized by UNESCO at Elsinore, Denmark,(58) where the shades of Marx, Engels and Kautsky rather than the ghost of Hamlet’s father stalked. A month later he was lecturing at a British Labour Party Summer School in Durham, England. (59) That year the New York City Board of Education conferred its annual Adult Student’s Award on Mark Starr as their prize specimen of an adult student who had made good.(60)

As educational director of the ILGWU, Starr helped to instill the Fabian Socialist approach in a labor union whose early history had been marked by episodes of physical violence and the politics of left wing revolt. He advised that “instead of arousing antagonism, as the old-time agitator had to do, now the union leader must be capable of skillful negotiation and of winning over public opinion to support the claims of his organization.” (61) In cooperation with the Federal Council of Churches and other religious bodies, he arranged visits to garment shops and union headquarters for groups of clergymen and presented them with an adroit propaganda pamphlet, What the Church Thinks of Labor. (62)

Through LID connections and the Public Affairs Committee which he chaired in 1949, Starr also developed fruitful contacts between the ILGWU and liberal professors throughout the country—but particularly at the Harvard School of Business Administration. Speaking with a lingering trace of a Welsh burr, Starr delivered the Ingliss lecture at Harvard on “Labor Education.” In August, 1949, the Harvard Business Review carried an article by Willard A. Lewis of the ILGWU legal department,(63) and in 1952 Starr addressed the Harvard Business School Club.

It is interesting to note that in April, 1953, Starr’s department organized an ILGWU panel discussion, where the subject of “Planning and Personal Freedom” was discussed by such “eminent experts” as Dr. George Soule of Columbia University and the New Republic, and Dr. J. Kenneth Galbraith and Dr. Seymour E. Harris of Harvard (64)—the latter pair to become controversial figures seven years later as advisers to the Kennedy Administration. In 1951 Clarence Senior—another future Kennedy adviser—addressed a weekend institute at Hudson View Lodge on the Puerto Rican problem.(65) During such sessions, the learned gentlemen both received and imparted instruction, as preliminary grooming for the future demands of public life.

University and public libraries were generously supplied by Starr with union literature. In one case, a pamphlet giving the union’s view on Trends and Prospects in the Garment Industry was sent to the economics departments of 650 colleges. Labor attaches of United States Embassies abroad, in whose selection union endorsement often played a part, were furnished on request with union-produced pamphlets, phonograph records and propaganda films; and similar “assistance” was given to Occupation Forces in Japan and Europe.(66) All “educational” material distributed by the union was based, directly or indirectly, upon the Fabian Socialist premise formulated by G. D. H. Cole and promoted by Mark Starr as “dean of American labor educators.” Namely, that “education must build new incentives other than those of private gain!”

Under the watchful eye of Starr, research and political activities of the ILGWU were vastly expanded. Both departments were headed and staffed by trusted officials of the LID. Throughout that period of mutual growth, the ILGWU’s research director was Dr. Lazare Teper, who had joined SLID at Johns Hopkins and served for years as a director of the adult LID. In 1951 and after, Dr. Teper lectured at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, evoking no protest whatever from the Socialist Party or its allies. (67)

Political director of the ILGWU under Starr’s command was Gus Tyler, a product of SLID at City College of New York.(68) According to an article in The New York Times, it was Tyler who in 1949 introduced political stewards or “commissars” into union locals.(69) That same year he gave a course on politics at the City College of New York, and in 1950 conducted a course in Political Action at the New School for Social Research. Since 1961, Gus Tyler has been overall educational director of the ILGWU, succeeding Mark Starr but following loyally in his footsteps. Starr’s permanent secretary was the Russian-born Fannia M. Cohn, nominally responsible for arranging “panel discussions.” Veteran member of the LID from the days when it was known as the ISS, she served on the executive committee of the League’s New York chapter.

Through the combined efforts of such “democratic” Socialists, the ample research facilities of the ILGWU were made available in a more or less guarded fashion to the LID. Thus, from 1935, the ILGWU’s research department stood in somewhat the same relation to the LID as the New Fabian Research Bureau did to the British Fabian Society.(70) At Starr’s invitation, the redoubtable Margaret Cole herself often flew from London to address union groups (71) and presumably to synchronize “research” operations with those of the British comrades.

Even today, when the widely diffused “research” activity of the Fabian Socialist movement in America is parceled out among various specialized fringe organizations, as well as university centers for “advanced study,” the research department of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union continues to function as a control center and guiding force in the politico-labor field. Allegedly it is acting for the benefit of its members and those of sister unions, domestic and foreign, which it aids.

During Mark Starr’s prolonged and well-paid term as educational director, the union probably became better known abroad than any other American labor organization. More and more, its New York headquarters were a port of call for labor delegates coming from Germany, Japan, Italy, Korea, and especially from Latin America. (72) Educational assistance and political advice were freely given to budding labor unions, all the way from Ireland to New Zealand, from Ghana to Chile and Brazil. In some instances, the freshly organized unions actually preceded the establishment of industries in which they hoped to set labor standards. Nevertheless, they provided bases for political agitation in backward countries seeking to install Socialist-oriented governments, and in new nations emerging from the Fabian-shattered remnants of once-flourishing colonial empires.

Starr’s services to Fabian Socialism on a world-wide scale appear to date from 1948, when his opportunities as a member of an official government commission dovetailed neatly with his union duties. That was the same year David Dubinsky, freewheeling president of the ILGWU, helped to launch the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU),(73) labor adjunct of the Socialist International. In 1949, Dubinsky addressed the Fabian Society in London while attending the first annual meeting of the Confederation.(74)

Effective organizer of the Free Trade Union Committee in America was Jay Lovestone, international director of the ILGWU. A brilliant, if mercurial character, Lovestone had received his baptism in Socialism as student president of the ISS chapter at the City College of New York. Veering leftward, he became a top functionary of the Communist Party but was expelled for “left deviationism.” Thereafter, he headed a group of American Marxists who supported the exiled Leon Trotsky and his doctrine of permanent revolution. As such, Lovestone was welcomed back into the Fabian Socialist fold and entrusted with far-flung international missions in the name of labor. Together with his assistant and faithful shadow, Irving Brown, he has since visited trouble spots in Europe and the Orient on all-expenses-paid union tours as a labor statesman and traveling inspector general.

If anyone wonders what possible influence such an internahona1 labor body could have on domestic events in the United States, at least one example can be cited. On March 11-13, 1963, the Railwaymen’s Section Committee of the International Transport Workers Federation met in Brussels. According to the International Trade Union News of April 1, 1963, issued fortnightly by the ICFTU:

“The Committee expressed deep concern at the very serious position in which railwaymen of many countries in all parts of the world found themselves, as the result of transport policies directed against the railways or the ruthless rationalization plans of management, or both. These developments were jeopardizing the livelihood of many railwaymen, and in some cases the obstinate attitude of the employers was forcing the railway unions to take militant action ….”(75)

Based on “research” by a Fabian Socialist-controlled international labor group, decisions were reached in Brussels identical to those leading to the renewed call for a nationwide railroad strike in America not many weeks later.

Just as the Transport and General Workers Union in Britain has long been the chief bulwark of the London Fabian Society, so the ILGWU and the closely related Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union have been twin pillars of strength to the LID. From 1935 to 1952, the ILGWU donated 21 million dollars to alleged worthy causes, (76) including political campaigns. From 1951 to 1953 alone, its benefactions exceeded five million dollars (77)—of which the greater part was extracted from the pay envelopes of working people and spent at the discretion of union officials. With financial angels of such stature in the offing, it is little wonder that the Fabian Socialist movement in America prospered and that its influence grew out of all proportion to the modest size of its directive body: the League for Indushia1 Democracy.

At the present fume, the LID enjoys the positron of an elder statesman, having delegated many of its more active functions to kindred organizations colonized and steered by certified Socialist “collaborators,” past and present. Its own list of officers and directors for 1963 discloses a stable handful of old-timers plus a number of youthful newcomers, among them children and grandchildren of original members. For the moment, the League appears to be hardly more than an appendage of the needle trades unions, as it once seemed a mere pensioner of the Rand School. Nevertheless, it is still the senior body of Fabian Socialism in America, from which future dictates on Socialist fashions may be expected to issue. At any desired instant, it can spring to new life again, even though its current status may appear to some to be that of a has-been. Like the Fabian Society of London, the League for Industrial Democracy has always been one of the most underrated Socialist leadership groups in the world.

The fact is that the LID has been preparing ever since the end of World War II for what seems to be virtual retirement. Its star studded anniversary meetings of the nineteen-fifties were a series of premature swan songs. Already every one of those successor organizations had been founded and activated that were to adapt Fabian Socialism to the grandiose dimensions of the space age. These would transport the United States, by fast freeway, toward a shimmering goal which present-day Socialists call “total democracy” but which earlier, undisguised Marxists admitted was world-wide social revolution.

Appropriately, the LID conferred its 1963 award for distinguished service upon the aged Upton Sinclair, last surviving member of the group that issued the original call to the ISS in 1905. With his usual happy faculty for letting the radical cat out of the bag, it was Upton Sinclair who on another occasion revealed the tried-and-true route by which Fabian Socialism must travel to power in the United States. Experience had already shown, said he, that it would be done via the two-party system, rather than through any third party. “So I know,” announced Sinclair, “that it will be the Democratic Party and not the Socialist Party which will bring this great change to America. It will not be called socialism; its opponents will insist that it is communism, while its friends will know that it is industrial democracy.” (78)

Footnotes

1. In 1928 Roger Baldwin, longtime Executive Director of the ACLU, stated flatly: “I believe in revolution–not necessarily the forcible seizure of power in armed conflict, but the process of growth of class movements determined to expropriate the capitalist class and to take control of all social property. Being pacifist–because I believe non-violent means best calculated in the long run to achieve enduring results, I am opposed to revolutionary violence. But I would rather see violent revolution than none at all, though I would not personally support it because I consider other means far better. Even the terrible cost of bloody revolution is a cheaper price to humanity than the continued exploitation and wreck of human life under the settled violence of the present system.” Roger Baldwin, “The Need for Militancy,” The Socialism of Our Times, edited by Harry W. Laidler and Norman Thomas, A Symposium. (New York, The Vanguard Press, Inc., 1929.) For the League for Industrial Democracy (based on a Conference of the League for Industrial Democracy held at Camp Tamiment in June, 1928), p. 77.

28. Freedom and the Welfare State. A Symposium by Oscar R. Ewing, Herbert H. Lehman, George Meany, Walter P. Reuther and others. Harry W. Laidler, ed. On the Occasion of the 45th Anniversary of the League for Industrial Democracy (New York, League for Industrial Democracy, 1950), p. 34.

31. Joseph Lash, together with Monroe Sweetland, later editor of the Oregon Democrat, and George Edwards, a future member of the bench in Detroit, were named by Mina Weisenberg in The League for Industrial Democracy: Fifty Years of Democratic Education (New York, League for Industrial Democracy, 1955), as leaders of the SLID during that period.

33. Now the United Automobile, Aircraft and Agricultural Implement Workers Union of America, with a membership said to exceed 1,000,000.

34. In Left Communism, an Infantile Disease, V. I. Lenin advised his followers: “It is necessary to agree to any sacrifice, to resort to all sorts of devices, maneuvers and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuge, in order to penetrate the trade unions, to remain in them and to carry out Communist work in them at all costs.”

35. As recently as 1963, James Farmer was a member of the board of the adult League for Industrial Democracy.

36. Although a National Student Association report of September, 1953, stated that the Students’ League for Industrial Democracy was defunct, an official League brochure published in 1955, The League for Industrial Democracy At Mid-Century, reported that in June, 1954 the Students’ League held a conference on “The Patterns of Social Reform in North America” at the International Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in New York. There a Canadian Member of Parliament addressed them from the same rostrum as C. Wright Mills, sociology professor from Columbia; Daniel Bell, labor editor of Fortune magazine; Felix Gross, sociologist from Brooklyn College and mark Starr, labor educator. (Speakers cited are listed by Mina Weisenberg as “collaborators” of the adult League.)

38. See statement at the League’s 40th Anniversary dinner by the Hon. Newbold Morris, President, New York City Council. Forty Years of Education (New York, League for Industrial Democracy, 1945), pp. 39-40. In this speech Morris said: “Norman Thomas is a Socialist. Yet I don’t believe that there are very many principles which would remove Norman Thomas from a liberal in any party, and I suppose he chose the hard way. . . . He might have climbed the ladder by enrolling in either one of the major parties and going from Alderman to Sheriff, to Borough President, to Congressman, to United States Senator and so on all the way up. . . . There are a lot of others around here who have chosen the hard way and I admire them for it.”

39. Thomas, op. cit., p. 5.

40. Ibid., p. 8.

41. Ibid., p. 8.

42. Ibid., pp. 28-29.

43. Hugh Gaitskell, M. P., Socialism and Nationalisation, Fabian Tract No. 300 (July, 1956). In the foreword, Gaitskell states he wrote the essay in 1953 (the same year that Democratic Socialism appeared) but did not publish it until 1956.

44. Thomas, op. cit., p. 10.

45. Ibid., p. 9.

46. Ibid., p. 34. The Natural Law, implicit in the United States Constitution, recognizes the inherent right of human creatures to exist. Associations, being manmade, have no inherent rights and only exist permissively.

47. Ibid., p. 9.

48. Later The National Council of Churches, and affiliated today with the World Council of Churches.

49. Hearst Headline Service dispatch by David Sentner. Published September 1, 1963. Children of Light and Children of Darkness, published in 1945, is a collection of the West Foundation lectures delivered by Dr Reinhold Niebuhr at Stanford University in 1944. It is an argument for the “mixed economy” and “the open society,” regarded by Socialists as a transitional stage to Socialism. Only ten years earlier, in Reflexions on the End of an Era, (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934). Dr. Niebuhr had said that the sickness of capitalism was “organic and constitutional”–rooted in “the very nature of capitalism . . . in the private ownership of the productive process.” He predicted that “the end of capitalism will be bloody rather than peaceful,” and considered Marxism “an essentially correct theory and analysis of the economic realities of modern society.” (See Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social and Political Thought, edited by Charles W. Kagley and Robert W. Bretall (New York, The Macmillan Co., 1956), p. 137.)

50. See Appendix II. See also annual lists of League for Industrial Democracy’s officers and board of directors.

51. Freedom and the Welfare State (New York, League for Industrial Democracy, 1950), pp. 7ff. British Fabian speakers on that occasion included Corley Smith, Economic and Social Counselor, United Kingdom Delegation to the United Nations; Margaret Herbison, M. P., Under Secretary for Scotland; Toni Sender, Representative of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions to the United Nations, G. D. H. and Margaret Cole and Morgan Phillips of the Socialist International sent greetings.

53. Report of Education Department, ILGWU (June 1, 1948-May 31, 1950), p. 15. During that period, Mark Starr also helped to revise a new edition of Labor in America, a senior high school text, ibid., p. 15.

54. “Adult education” was a field in which Margaret Cole and her husband were active for years. It became her chief public function in 1951-1960, when she was chairman of the Further Education Committee of the London County Council, Fabian News (January, 1963).

55. Report of the American Fund for Public Service, popularly called the Garland Fund, 1925-28, states, “For the three-year period covered by this report, the enterprises to which we have given outright the largest amounts of money were: Vanguard Press, $139,453; Brookwood Labor College, $74,227; Rand School, research department, $16,116; League for Industrial Democracy, $10,500.” Cf. testimony of Walter S. Steele before the House of Representatives, Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States, Report of Committee (December, 1930), p. 226.

Steele’s testimony continues, as follows: “The Vanguard Series, issued by The Vanguard Press, was organized and financed by the American Fund for Public Service, Inc. and distributed by the Rand Bookstore. (The Vanguard Press was set up by the communist-socialist controlled American Fund for Public Service, Inc. It publishes communist-socialist literature for distribution. Its publications are also distributed by the Rand Press.”

67. Report of Education Department, ILGWU (June 1951-May 1953), p. 27. (See also report, The Ultra Right and the Military Industrial Complex, published by the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation and submitted with a covering letter by Norman Thomas to the Special Preparedness Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. Hearings before the Subcommittee, Part 6, 1962, pp. 3016 ff. In this document, Socialists protest against permitting conservative speakers to address the Armed Services.)

In the future as in the past, the continuing leadership of the Socialist movement in the United States resided in America’s Fabian Society, (1) the polite but persistent Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which changed its name but not its nature in 1921. Discarding the Socialist title, that by now had become a liability, it called itself the League for Industrial Democracy—the name under which it survives today.

This alias implied no break with the destructive philosophy and goals of international Socialism. It was rather a device for pursuing them more discreetly, at a temporarily reduced speed. Few outsiders connected the term Industrial Democracy with those archetypes of Fabian Socialism, England’s Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who had used it as the title for one of their earliest propaganda books. The slogan adopted by the LID, “Production for use and not for profit,” originated with Belfort Bax, another vintage British Socialist. It was a handy formula for expressing Marxist aims in non-Marxist language.

Although most of its members and friends now described themselves publicly as liberals, basically the American society remained the same. As ever, its self-appointed function was to produce the intellectual leaders and to formulate the plans for achieving an eventual Socialist State in America. Like its British model, the LID proposed to operate from the top down and meet the working masses halfway. Voting power and financial support would come from labor, which was to be organized as far as possible into industry-wide, Socialist-led unions.

As the Lusk Committee only vaguely surmised, (2) British Socialists, not Russian nor German, had set the pattern for gradual social revolution to be followed in America and other English-speaking countries. The development of an elite, and research for planning and control purposes, were its primary tasks. Penetration and permeation of existing institutions, indirect rather than direct action, were its recommended procedures.

Owing to the greater expanse and complexity of the United States as compared to England, and to the wide variety of opinions due to the varied national origins of its people, special emphasis had to be placed on the formation of opinion-shaping and policy-directing groups at every level—particularly in the fields of education, political action, economics and foreign relations. While as yet such groups existed only in embryo, and Socialist programs were in public disrepute, sooner or later the opportunity for a breakthrough would come. The way of the turtle was slow but sure.

Superficially, some changes in LID operations were made in deference to the times. Adults were now frankly admitted to membership in an organization which they had always dominated. Student chapters, disrupted by the war, had almost disappeared; but until 1928 no direct effort was made to revive them in the name of the Students’ League for Industrial Democracy. For the moment, it seemed more prudent to operate through the new Intercollegiate Liberal League, formed in April, 1921, at a Harvard conference attended by 250 student delegates from assorted colleges.(3)

Keynote speakers at this conference included such trusty troupers of the old Intercollegiate Socialist Society as Walter Lippmann, Henry Mussey, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Reverend John Haynes Holmes (4)—all billed as liberals rather than Socialists. The objectives of the organization, as stated in the prospectus, were even more carefully understated than those of the former ISS. They were: The cultivation of the open mind; the development of an informed student opinion on social, industrial, political and international questions. (5) Due to the reassuring tone of the prospectus and the psychological appeal of the word liberal, three presidents of leading Eastern colleges actually consented to address the organizing conference. (6)

In his speech on that occasion, the Reverend Holmes invited students to “identify themselves with the labor world, and there to martyr themselves by preaching the gospel of free souls and love as the rule of life.” Vaguely, he predicted a revolution and added, “If you want to be on the side of fundamental right, you have got to be on the side of labor.” A militant advocate of pacificism during the war, Reverend Holmes had frequently been under surveillance by Federal agents. Intelligence sources reported that his speeches were used as propaganda material by the German Army in its efforts to break down the morale of American troops.

Subsequent meetings of the Intercollegiate Liberal League dealt with what British Fabians of the period often referred to as “practical problems of the day.” Speakers were provided through the cooperation of the New Republic, whose literary editor, Robert Morss Lovett, was also president of the LID. Both English and American Fabian Socialists responded to the call. In January, 1923, the Fabian News of London announced:

“W. A. Robson has gone to America for about six months, as a member of a small European mission which will lecture at the leading universities under the auspices of the Intercollegiate Liberal Union [sic].”

Evidently a touch of Fabian elegance was needed, for the Liberal League’s Socialist slip was already showing. In 1922, that outspoken American Socialist, Upton Sinclair, making a tour of the universities, had delivered several lectures sponsored by the Intercollegiate Liberal League(7)—and very nearly succeeded in exposing its Socialist origin. Concerning such incidents, a committee of the American Association of University Professors reported tolerantly: “The Intercollegiate Liberal League suffered from misinterpretation, and somewhat at the hands of ‘heresy hunters.’” (8) In 1922, it merged with the Student Forum and its membership numbered a select 850 on eight college campuses.

Like the young people whom it was schooling in duplicity, the parent LID cultivated a liberal look and an air of candid innocence. This pose was rendered more credible by the fact that certain troublesome “cooperators” had voluntarily withdrawn from the ISS. Gone but not forgotten were firebrands like Ella Reeve Bloor, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Z. Foster and Robert Minor, who had been active in the violent IWW-led strikes of other years and who later became top functionaries in the Communist Party.

No suspicion of Communist ties could be permitted to cast its shadow upon the League for Industrial Democracy, on which the future of the Socialist movement in America depended. Yet individual members and even ranking officers, acting independently or through subsidiary organizations, continued to display a puzzling solicitude for the well-being of illicit Communists. To an outsider it sometimes looked as if the chief concern of open-minded League members in the nineteen-twenties was to procure the survival of the illegal Communist Party, then calling itself the Workers’ Party, with whose methods they were officially in disagreement.

In this connection, it may be pointed out that the role of the renovated LID was from the start a defensive one. After 1917, both public officials and the American public at large regarded Communism very much as Anarchism had been viewed in the eighteen-eighties and nineties. Since virtually all members of Communist parties here and abroad were former Socialists, and since a good many avowed Socialists (9) had now one foot in the Communist camp, the average American could hardly be expected to make much distinction between them. A respectable front was urgently needed.

Like the Bellamy clubs of a previous era, the LID was called upon, not only to make Socialism acceptable under other names, but to preserve the whole social revolutionary movement in this country from possible extinction. “Left can speak to left”—a principle later voiced by the British Fabian, Ernest Bevin, at Potsdam—was its undeclared but pragmatic rule of action.

There is no doubt that radicals of every kind were highly unpopular in the United States after World War I—and no doubt there were good reasons. Information had been received linking a number of left wing publications in this country with the Communist International’s propaganda headquarters in Berlin. As a result, the Department of Justice launched an all-out drive to immobilize centers of seditious propaganda in America. A series of raids was conducted in 1919-20 by order of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, which led four Harvard Law School professors headed by Felix Frankfurter to file a protest with the Justice Department. (10) Socialist-liberal writers—enjoying themselves hugely, as Walter Lippmann recalls—joined forces to taunt and harass the earnest if unsophisticated officers of the law.

When steps were also taken in 1919-20 to close the Rand School of Social Science on grounds that it harbored known Bolsheviks, (11) there was some fear that even the Intercollegiate Socialist Society itself might soon be exposed to summary action. Not only August Claessens, but a whole flock of ISS valued “cooperators” were listed as instructors and lecturers at the Rand School in June, 1919, (12) when the New York State Legislature appointed a committee headed by Senator Clayton R. Lusk to investigate radical activities. The Senator’s methods were of a classic simplicity. He issued a search warrant and called for State Troopers to escort the investigators who descended suddenly on the Rand School, impounding records and files.

On the basis of evidence so obtained, the Committee took steps to close the school by court injunction and throw it into receivership. With the help of Samuel Untermeyer, a prominent New York attorney whose brother, Louis, taught Modem Poetry at the Rand School, the injunction was lifted and the school’s records were returned. Thereupon the so-called Lusk Laws were passed,(13) requiring all private schools in New York State to be licensed. The purpose was to close the Rand School on grounds that it did not meet the necessary qualifications.

Here the hidden source of Socialist power in New York hinted at by August Claessens, suddenly revealed itself. The attorney for the Rand School, Morris Hillquit, was backed by the mass indignation and voting power of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and other Socialist-led trade unions. Prudently the Lusk Laws were vetoed in 1920 by that happy warrior, Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith, in what has been described as the most brilliant veto message of his career. The episode is significant because it marked the first step in an unholy alliance between the New York State Democratic organization and the Socialist-led needle trades unions: an alliance that was to put Franklin D. Roosevelt into the Governor’s mansion and eventually into the White House, and bring “democratic Socialists” into the highest councils of Government.

Governor Smith’s veto of the Lusk Laws also offered a striking example of the uses of Fabian Socialist permeation in America—the technique recommended so warmly by Beatrice Webb, explained so clearly by Margaret Cole (14) and employed so successfully by British Fabians operating inside the Liberal Party in England. It is a technique of inducing non-Socialists to do the work and the will of Socialists. No one supposes for a moment that Governor Al Smith was himself a Socialist; nor does anyone imagine he drafted that very brilliant veto message personally. Besides being an astute politician of the Tammany Hall stripe, Smith was a devout Catholic layman. To reach him required not only permeation at first hand, but permeation at second hand as well.

In this instance, it may be noted that one of Governor Smith’s counselors on matters involving “social justice” was Father (later Monsignor) John Augustin Ryan of the National Catholic Welfare Council, (15) who in 1915 founded the Department of Social Sciences at the Catholic University of America. In an objective analysis entitled The Economic Thought of John A. Ryan, Dr. Patrick Gearty has revealed that much of Father Ryan’s thinking on social and economic matters was derived from John Atkinson Hobson, the British Fabian Socialist philosopher and avowed rationalist.

In 1919, Father Ryan had already unveiled the draft of a postwar “reconstruction” plan, in an address delivered in West Virginia before the conservative Knights of Columbus. The Ryan plan has since been known by the somewhat misleading title of “The Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction,” because it was printed over the signatures of four Bishops who formed the National Catholic Welfare Council’s Executive Committee. It was reprinted in 1931, just prior to the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President.

An illuminating fact about the plan was that it took special note of “the social reconstruction program of the British Labor Party”—a program written by Sidney Webb and published as Labour and the New Social Order. Father Ryan specifically cited the “four pillars” of the Webb opus. Concerning them, he stated, “This program may properly be described as one of immediate radical reforms, leading to complete socialism …. Evidently this outcome cannot be approved by Catholics.”(16) True to Catholic orthodoxy, “complete Socialism” must be rejected; but not the bulk of the ill-begotten Fabian “reform” program. Illogically, Father Ryan praised the means while rejecting the end. Although his views certainly cannot be regarded as typical of the Catholic leaders of his day, he left disciples behind him and founded a school of thought which has since come to be accepted unquestioningly by many otherwise devout Catholic teachers and students of the social sciences.

More concretely, Father Ryan defended in speeches and articles the right of the five expelled Socialist Assemblymen to be seated in the New York State Legislature. In 1922, his name appeared on the letterhead of the Labor Defense Council, a joint Socialist-Communist construct, set up to obtain funds for the legal defense of illegal Communists arrested at Bridgman, Michigan, whose attorney of record was Frank P. Walsh.

Although controversial Catholic clerics of conservative economic views have occasionally been silenced, somehow John Augustin Ryan contrived to do very much as he pleased. At a later date he was frankly known as the padre of the New Deal; and for services rendered was honored in 1939 with a birthday dinner attended by more than six hundred persons. The guests included Supreme Court Justices Frankfurter, Douglas and Black, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Secretary of the Treasury Henry A. Morgenthau, Jr., plus a liberal assortment of left wing trade union leaders, progressive educators and New Deal congressmen.

There is no question that the moral influence of Father Ryan, coupled with considerations of practical politics, led Governor Smith in 1920 to intervene on behalf of the Rand School. In other respects, also, Smith anticipated that tolerance for Socialist programs and personalities which characterized his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. During Smith’s campaign for the Presidency in 1928, most of his eager supporters scarcely noticed it when he announced “over the radio” that he favored “public ownership of public power.”

The Lusk Laws were briefly revived in 1921 under Governor Nathan Miller, but the Rand School continued to operate happily without a license. It even collaborated in opening a summer school at Camp Tamiment vaguely patterned after Fabian Summer Schools in Britain. There New Republic regulars George Soule and Stuart Chase, Mary Austin, Evans Clark and other LID pundits (17) tutored the humbler Rand School rank-and-file in Socialist politics, economics and general culture.

With time and patience, the school settled its legal difficulties and has survived to the present day as a teaching, research, publishing and propaganda center of “peaceful” Marxism known as the Tamiment Institute. It has lived to enjoy 40th, 45th, 50th and 55th anniversary dinners, complete with souvenir booklets celebrating old times and old-timers. During its lifetime, it has been regularly favored with visits by leading British Fabians: from Bertrand Russell, John Strachey, M.P. and Norman Angell to Margaret Bondfield, M.P., Margaret Cole and Toni Sender, (18) representative of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions at the United Nations. While no change in the Rand School’s outlook has ever been recorded, so far has Socialism been rehabilitated, that the present Taminent Institute now wears an aura of respectability in some academic circles.

In the same year that the Lusk Laws were revived and every known radical organization in the country seemed to be under fire, the LID chose Robert Morss Lovett, professor of English at the University of Chicago, as its president, a post he was to hold for seventeen years. He was a man of keen intelligence, quiet charm and unfailing courtesy, with a thorough knowledge of nineteenth-century English prose sometimes called the literature of protest. To paraphrase Henry Adams, Lovett had been educated for the nineteenth century and found himself obliged to live in the twentieth, a situation to which he was never quite reconciled.

Born on Christmas Day to thrifty, pious New England parents, he came of pilgrim stock but never referred to it. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in the days when Bellamy-type Socialism, adorned with touches of John Ruskin and William Morris, was attracting young Cambridge intellectuals; and he made connections there that lasted until his death at the age of eighty-four. During the eighteen-nineties, Lovett went to Chicago to assist University President John Rainey Harper in bringing culture and scholarship to the booming Midwest. Soon he became a sort of campus legend by virtue of his wit, audacity, kindly disposition and practically unshakable aplomb. An inveterate diner-out and something of a bon vivant, he was punctual in keeping appointments and punctilious in meeting his commitments, academic or social. Because of a certain engaging simplicity of manner, all his life people were eager to protect him and insisted he was somehow being taken advantage of—though the fact was that he invariably did as he chose, without excuses or explanations.

Through his wife, a close friend of Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, Lovett was drawn into the circle of settlement workers, social reformers, pacifists, American Socialists and visiting British Fabians that revolved around Hull House. Due to his own pacifist activities during World War I, he became a scandal to patriots and a hero to Socialists. The event that transformed the rather aloof university professor into a public figure was a mammoth peace meeting in Chicago which ended in a riot.

The circumstances under which Lovett happened to preside at that gathering shed some light on his subsequent career. At the last minute, the original chairman of the meeting failed to appear, and other possible substitutes evaporated. Nobody of prominence could be found willing to take the responsibility for an event almost sure to provoke a public scandal. Obligingly and with a certain amused contempt for the absentees, Lovett agreed to act as chairman, thereby inaugurating a long and tangled career as front man for a legion of left wing organizations and committees. At moments when no one else of established reputation cared to expose himself, Lovett was always available. After the heat was off, others were pleased to take over.

In 1919, Lovett was invited to New York to become editor of The Dial, a literary monthly attempting to endow radicalism with a protective facade of culture and to provide an outlet for the talents of young college-trained Socialists then beginning to throng to the great city. Among his youthful staff assistants on The Dial were Lewis Mumford, (19) who has since become something of an authority on civic architecture and city planning, and Vera Brittain, who later married Professor George Catlin, a prime architect of Atlantic Union. In a year or two, Lovett was made literary editor of the New Republic, a position he occupied six months of the year while retaining his chair at the University of Chicago. He was also named to the Pulitzer prize fiction awards committee. These vantage posts not only provided liberal cover for a confirmed Fabian Socialist, but enabled him to promote the new literature of protest, with its emphasis on “debunking” American institutions, that became popular in the nineteen-twenties and thirties.

Through S. K. Ratcliffe, the New Republic’s long time London representative, and through that magazine’s opposite number in Britain, the New Statesman, it was easy enough to keep regularly in touch with the fountainhead of Fabian Socialism. So many eminent British Fabian authors and educators were busily traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, to share in the wealth of a country whose crassness they deplored, that they passed each other in transit on the high seas. Scarcely a one missed being entertained at the New Republic’s weekly staff luncheons, and Lovett and his associates were helpful in booking many on the lucrative university lecture circuit. As he confided to friends, Lovett longed to visit England; but was blacklisted by the British Foreign Office because he had aided some Hindu revolutionaries, only incidentally financed by German agents, during the war. Thus contacts between the Fabian Society of London and the titular head of its American affiliate necessarily remained indirect. For the time being, perhaps it was better so.

2.

Throughout the nineteen-twenties—while the United States was enjoying a giddy whirl of industrial growth and paper profits, and the outwitting of Prohibition agents became a major national pastime—there was always that same small, close-knit core of studious men and women bent on remaking the country according to a more or less veiled Marxist formula. Bitterly disappointed that world war had not produced a world-wide Socialist commonwealth, they still found much to console them in the international picture. The predominance of the Social Democratic Party in Germany; the existence of a somewhat crude but frankly all-Socialist State in Soviet Russia; and the emergence of the Fabian Socialist-controlled Labour Party as the second strongest political party in Britain: these developments gave them hope of being able some day to bring the unwilling United States to heel.

True, the Socialist movement in America still seemed a comparatively small affair, foreign to the great majority of average Americans. Its appeal was still confined chiefly to social workers, rebel college professors and students, a handful of ambitious lawyers and wealthy ladies, and a few militant Socialist-led unions that were far from representing a majority in the ranks of American labor. The postwar scene, however, was enlivened by the addition of many college-trained young people, cut adrift from family discipline and religious moorings, who found companionship, a faith and ultimately well paid careers within the reorganized Socialist movement. The prestige of British Fabian authors in New York publishing and book review circles helped to open doors for their liberal brethren in the United States. Superficially, the American version of the British Fabian Society almost looked, as it had in England, to be a species of logrolling literary society.

Political power, however, was the prize for which it secretly yearned, insignificant as its efforts in that direction might appear at the moment to be. Socialist intellectuals already aspired to influence the military and foreign policy of the United States and continued to plan quietly for the creation of a Socialist State in America within a world federation of Socialist States. Their postwar aspirations had been foreshadowed in a “Wartime Program” issued early in 1917 by the American Union Against Militarism: a program that in a small way echoed the British Fabian Socialist plan contained in Leonard Woolf’s International Government. The “Wartime Program” stated:

“With America’s entry into the war we must redouble our efforts to maintain democratic liberties, to destroy militarism, and to build towards world federation. Therefore, our immediate program is:

“To oppose all legislation tending to fasten upon the United States in wartime any permanent military policy based on compulsory military training and service.

“To organize legal advice and aid for all men conscientiously opposed to participation in war.

“To demand publication by the Government of all agreements or understandings with other nations.

“To demand a clear and definite statement of the terms on which the United States will make peace.

“To develop the ideal of internationalism in the minds of the American people to the end that this nation may stand firm for world federation at the end of the soar.

To fight for the complete maintenance in wartime of the constitutional right of free speech, free press, peaceable assembly and freedom from unlawful search and seizure. With this end in view the Union has recently established a Civil Liberties Bureau ….” (20)

Founders of the organization issuing that statement were described as “a group of well-known liberals. (21) Closer inspection, however, reveals that virtually every member of its founders’ committee was a long-standing “cooperator” of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, later the League for Industrial Democracy. (22)

When it became evident after the war that the Union’s dream of world federation must be postponed, the LID remained the directive and policy-making body behind a gradual Socialist movement soliciting public support on a variety of pretexts. Its aims were promoted through a handful of closely related organizations, invariably staffed at the executive level by directors and officers of the League. Chief among them were the American Civil Liberties Union ( ACLU ), the Federated Press, and the American Fund for Public Service, also known as the Garland Fund, a self-exhausting trust which helped to forestall deficits in the other organizations and even contributed charitably to the subsistence of masked Communist enterprises.

Through such organizations, the Socialist movement maintained discreet contacts with illegal Communist groups in the nineteen-twenties. William Z. Foster, identified then and later as a leader of the Communist Party, was both a director of the Federated Press and a trustee and indirect beneficiary of the Garland Fund. As late as 1938, four acknowledged Communists served on the national committee of the ACLU. (23)

While the LID stood aloof, taking no responsibility for the actions of its subsidiaries, their unity was visibly confirmed by the fact that Robert Morss Lovett held top posts in all four organizations. He was not only president of the LID, but a director of the A(:LU and the Federated Press, which served a number of labor papers and left wing publications, both Socialist and Communist. Lovett also sat on the board of trustees of the Garland Fund, and he chaired a host of ephemeral committees. In fact, he appeared in so many capacities at once that he was sometimes compared to the character in W. S. Gilbert’s ballad who claimed to be the cook, captain and mate of the Nancy brig plus a number of other things.

Obviously, Lovett could not really have directed all the organizations and committees over which he presided in the twenties and after. The administrative and editorial work of the League was handled by Harry Laidler, aided after 1922 by the former clergyman Norman Thomas in the sphere of Socialist politics and by Paul Blanshard as LID organizer. Paul Blanshard later directed the Federated Press. (24) More recently, he has been identified with an organization known as “Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State,” dedicated to expunging all references to God from public schools and public life in America. He anticipated G. D. II. Cole, the president of the London Fabian Society, who smilingly advocated “the abolition of God”!

Though Lovett’s actual duties—aside from his work as an editor, teacher and public speaker—always remained somewhat mysterious, he appears to have acted mainly as a liaison between top-level Socialists and Communists as well as academic and moneyed groups. During the Socialist movement’s period of temporary regression, he was in his glory. His contacts were numerous, and his personal amiability combined with discretion, made him acceptable to all. “Let one hand wash the other” and “recoil, the better to spring forward” (Reculer pour mieux sauter) were the private maxims that guided him on his variegated rounds. It was hard to believe that so delightful and considerate a dinner guest, as Felix Frankfurter has described in his autobiography, and so informed and sober a classroom figure could be so dangerous a radical.

Yet an old friend, who never shared his political views, still recalls how the normally serene Robert Morss Lovett once remarked with sudden intensity: “I hate the United States! I would be willing to see the whole world blow up, if it would destroy the United States!” His startled companion dismissed the incident as a momentary aberration —and refrained from mentioning to Lovett that his words were much the same as those of Philip Nolan in The Man Without a Country.

Most conspicuous of the postwar organizations manned by League for Industrial Democracy members was the American Civil Liberties Union. Like the LID, the ACLU has survived to the present day, acquiring a patina of respectability with the passage of time and the decline of old-fashioned patriotism, for which both bodies cherish an ill-concealed contempt.

Formed in January, 1920, the ACLU was a direct outgrowth of the wartime Civil Liberties Bureau, a branch of the American Union Against Militarism. The Bureau assumed “independent” life in 1917 when a young social worker from St. Louis named Roger Baldwin moved to New York to direct the work of its national office. (25) During the war, it furnished advice and legal aid to conscientious objectors, thus gaining the support of some quite reputable Quakers. When it was reorganized on a permanent basis after the war as the ACLU, Roger Baldwin, who had just finished a prison term for draft-dodging, returned as its executive officer. For all practical purposes, he ran the organization for approximately forty years.

While the ACLU was still in the process of formation, Baldwin wrote in an advisory letter: “Do steer away from making it look like a Socialist enterprise. We want also to look patriots in everything we dot-We want to get a good lot of flags, talk a good deal about the Constitution and what our forefathers wanted to make of the country, and to show that we are really the folks that really stand for the spirit of our institutions.” (26) Such deceptive practice was in the classic Fabian tradition—symbolized by the wolf in sheep’s clothing that decorates the Shavian stained-glass window at a Fabian meetinghouse in England. Promptly adopted by Baldwin’s associates, this tactic has succeeded in deluding not a few well-intentioned Americans.

The immediate function of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 was to combat the postwar flurry of arrests, deportations and court actions against Communists and other seditionists, many of whom were foreign born. Baldwin had previously described such individuals “as representing labor and radical movements for human welfare,” and contended they were being “insidiously attacked by privileged business interests working under the cloak of patriotism.” (27) Twin weapons of the quasi-forensic ACLU were legal aid and a species of propaganda designed to arouse public sympathy for the “victims” of the law—an expedient normally frowned upon by the American bar.

If it was Roger Baldwin who defined the propaganda line, another founder of the ACLU,(28) Harvard Law Professor Felix Frankfurter, provided the legalistic approach. In his protest of 1920 to the Department of Justice; in his argument as amicus curiae before a federal court in Boston, where he assured the right of habeas corpus to criminal aliens awaiting deportation; (29) and earlier, in two reports submitted as counsel for President Wilson’s Mediation Commission, Frankfurter initiated the mischievous practice of invoking the Constitution for the benefit of its avowed enemies.

Perhaps more than any other American, Frankfurter helped to establish the fiction that it is somehow unconstitutional and un-American for the United States to take measures to defend itself against individuals or groups pledged to destroy it. His reports on the Preparedness Day bombings and the Bisbee deportations won him a sharp rebuke from that forthright American, former President Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote in a personal letter to Frankfurter:

“I have just received your report on the Bisbee deportations …. Your report is as thoroughly misleading a document as could be written on the subject . .

“Here again you are engaged in excusing men precisely like the Bolsheviki in Russia, who are murderers and encouragers of murder, who are traitors to their allies, to democracy and to civilization . . . and whose acts are nevertheless apologized for on grounds, my dear Mr. Frankfurter, substantially like those which you allege. In times of danger nothing is more common and more dangerous to the Republic than for men to avoid condemning the criminals who are really public enemies by making their entire assault on the shortcomings of the good citizens who have been the victims or opponents of the criminals …. lt is not the kind of thing I care to see well-meaning men do in this country.”(30)

One of the more sensational events in which early leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union took a hand was the case of the “Michigan Syndicalists.” The circumstances leading up to it were peculiar, to say the least. In August, 1922, a Hungarian agent of the Communist International, one Joseph Pogany, alias Lang, alias John Pepper, arrived illegally in the United States. Having assisted in setting up the short-lived Bela Kun Government in Hungary, he was presumed to be something of a specialist in the bloodier forms of revolutionary behavior. Pogany brought with him detailed instructions for organizing both legal and illegal branches of the new Communist Party USA. Those instructions were to be divulged by him at a secret Communist convention, held at a camp in the woods near Bridgman, Michigan, which was duly raided by the authorities.

As a result, seventeen Communists—including William Z. Foster, then editor of the Labor Herald–were arrested and arraigned under Michigan’s anti-syndicalist laws. At his trial in Bridgman, Foster, who later openly headed the Communist Party, testified under oath that he was not a Communist, thereby escaping conviction. Many others attending the conclave had prudently slipped away the night before the raid, leaving a mass of records and documents behind. In sifting this material, it was discovered that several of the delegates were connected with the Rand School of Social Science. Some, like Rose Pastor Stokes and Max Lerner, have since been listed as “cooperators” of the LID. (31)

Max Lerner, a bright young intellectual who had been a student leader of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society at Washington University in St. Louis, was among the seventeen persons arrested in or near Bridgman. Like Foster, he claimed to have attended that secret convention in an editorial capacity. What his other motives may have been are not recorded, since from that time forward Lerner appeared to operate strictly within the framework of the Fabian Socialist movement. For years he continued to write articles for The Nation, The Call and The New Leader, and to lecture on economics at the Rand School, the New School for Social Research and more conventional institutions of learning. He was a lifelong admirer of the self-proclaimed Marxist, Harold Laski, who found Lerner’s political outlook close to his own.(32)

When Laski was quoted in 1945 by the Newark Advertiser as condoning bloody revolution, he sued for libel in a London court—and lost the case. It was Max Lerner (together with Harvard Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.) who took the initiative in collecting an American “fund” for Laski,(33) to help defray the latter’s court costs of some twelve thousand pounds. More recently, we find an unreconstructed Max Lerner writing a widely circulated column for American newspapers. In an article sent from Switzerland in August, 1963, he deftly exploited the malodorous Stephen Ward pandering case (forced into prominence by the Fabian Harold Wilson, M.P.) as a means of promoting sympathy for Socialism.(34)

The pained outcry that the Bridgman case evoked in the twenties from Socialist-liberal writers and publicists was symptomatic of a curious phenomenon never explained by medical science: Wound a Communist, and a Socialist bleeds! A circular letter of April G, 1923, soliciting funds for the legal defense of the arrested Communists, described them plaintively as a “group of men and women met together peacefully to consider the business of their party organization.” This letter appeared on the stationery of the Labor Defense Council, whose national committee included the names of well-known Communists. It was signed by eight equally well-known members of the LID and/or ACLU. (35) At about the same time, Robert Morss Lovett persuaded the wealthy wife of a University of Chicago professor, to post securities valued at $25,000 as bond for the Bridgman defendants. The securities were subsequently forfeited when several of the accused jumped bail and fled to Moscow.

A more enduring cause celebre, in which both Socialist- and Communist-sponsored “defense” organizations battled jointly to reverse the course of justice, was the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants of admitted Anarchist views (36) who were arrested in 1920 for the robbery and murder of a paymaster and paymaster’s guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Found guilty and sentenced to die, they were finally executed in 1927. Since several million words have already been written about the case in the form of legal briefs, editorials, articles and books, it would be superfluous to review the matter in detail. Some $300,000 was contributed for the legal defense of those “two obscure immigrants about whom nobody cared”—as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has described them sentimentally in The Age of Roosevelt.

Left wing leaders had apparently promised Sacco and Vanzetti they would be saved at any cost, and a mighty effort was made to that end. All the available propaganda stops were pulled out. The whole spectrum of leftist literary lights, from Liberal to Socialist to Communist, was brought into play. Academic Socialism’s foremost figures were enlisted to dignify the campaign, and student organizations were rounded up. Among the legal scholars who helped to prepare documents on the case was Harvard Law Professor Francis B. Sayre, son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson and a relative of the Reverend John Nevin Sayre. (37) The Brandeis family became so emotionally involved in the cause of the two allegedly persecuted immigrants that Justice Brandeis felt obliged to disqualify himself when the question of reviewing the case reached the Supreme Court.

For several years the Harvard campus was split down the middle on the issue of Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt or innocence. Professors Felix Frankfurter and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. rallied the innocence-mongers. They were supported by Roscoe Pound, Dean of the Law School and a disciple of Brandeis in the field of sociological law. On the other hand, University President A. Lawrence Lowell urged moderation and suggested that some credence be placed in the good faith and common sense of Massachusetts’ judges and law enforcement officers. So vehemently did Felix Frankfurter denounce his academic superior that it was suggested the little law professor resign. “Why should I resign?” asked Frankfurter, adding insolently, “Let Lowell resign!” When it was all over, the long-suffering President Lowell wrote in mild exasperation to Dean Pound that he thought “one Frankfurter to the Pound should be enough.”

Not only The Nation and New Republic, but at least two respected New York dailies, insisted to the end that Sacco and Vanzetti were the blameless victims of a Red scare or public witch hunt. So impassioned and so confusing was the public debate that some Americans today are still under the impression that Sacco and Vanzetti were somehow “framed” or “railroaded” to their death. Only recently a final confirmation of their guilt has come to light. It was contained in a quiet announcement by Francis Russell, a man who has spent the better part of his life seeking to demonstrate Sacco and Vanzetti’s innocence.

In the June, 1962, issue of American Heritage Russell told how he finally traced the long-missing bullets found in the body of the paymaster’s guard, Berardelli, to a police captain, now deceased. Two ballistic experts, using modern techniques, analyzed the bullets and testified they had unquestionably been fired from the .32 caliber pistol which Sacco was carrying at the time of his arrest. Thus Francis Russell was forced to conclude that Sacco wielded the murder weapon and that Vanzetti was at least an accessory.

Oddly enough, a similar conclusion based on less objective evidence was made public by Upton Sinclair in 1953. In a memoir published serially in the Rand School’s quarterly Bulletin of International Socialist Studies, (38) Sinclair quoted Fred A. Moore, an attorney for Sacco and Vanzetti, as saying he believed Sacco to be guilty of the shooting and Vanzetti to have guilty knowledge of it. Sinclair further relates how Robert Minor, a Communist Party official, telephoned him long distance in Boston and begged him not to repeat the attorney’s opinion. “You will ruin the movement! It will be treason!” cried Minor.

From that indiscreet telephone call, it is inferred that Sacco and Vanzetti may have robbed and killed to fill the Party’s underground treasury, as Stalin and his Bolshevik comrades are known to have done in Russian Georgia during 1910-11. At any rate, the missing payroll funds, amounting to nearly $16,000, were never recovered. A third man, reported by witnesses to have assisted at the South Braintree crime, vanished coincidentally with the cash. This, however, is not the “legacy” referred to by Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., who in 1948 wrote the introduction to an emotion-packed volume perpetuating the martyr legend of “the poor fish-peddler and the good shoemaker.” (39) As of 1962, Schlesinger’s son, Arthur, Jr., was a member of the national committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had handled the appeals and coordinated the propaganda in the historic Sacco and Vanzetti case.(40)

Footnotes

1. Forty Years of Education (New York, League for Industrial Democracy, 1945), p. 56. A telegram to the League on its fortieth anniversary from Mandel V. Halushka, a Chicago schoolteacher, read, “Birthday greetings to America’s Fabian Society!”

2. Only two direct references to the Fabian Society occur in the Lusk Report, and the first is misleading:

“In England during the ‘80’s the Fabian Society was formed which remains an influential group of intellectual Socialists, but without direct influence on the working man or Parliament.” Revolutionary Radicalism, Vol. I, p. 53.

“We have already called attention to the Fabian Society as an interesting group of intellectual Socialists who engage in a very brilliant campaign of propaganda.” Ibid., p. 145.

Obviously, the Lusk Committee underestimated both the current and potential influence of the Society.

3. Depression, Recovery and Higher Education. A Report by (a) Committee of the American Association of University Professors. Prepared by Malcolm M. Willey, University of Minnesota, (New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1937), p. 317.

4. Ibid.

5. Italics originally added, now removed.

6. Ibid.

7. At other colleges and universities Upton Sinclair’s lectures were sponsored by local units of the Cosmopolitan Club–an organization similar in character and inspiration to the Intercollegiate Liberal League.

8. Ibid.

9. Algernon Lee, author of The Essentials of Marxism, said: “A large proportion in the early nineteen-twenties went Communist, and of these only a few have found there way back.” Quoted in August Claessens’ autobiography, Didn’t We Have Fun? (New York, Rand School Press, 1953), p. 20.

11. Who’s Who in New York for 1918 lists A. A. Heller as a director of the Rand School. Treasurer and general manager of the International Oxygen Company, which had benefitted from wartime contracts, the Russian-born Heller served as commercial attache of the unofficial “Soviet Embassy,” whose chief, Ludwig Martens, left the United States under pressure.

13. The year that the Lusk Laws were passed and vetoed by Smith, 1920, the School heard Louis Lochner on Journalism, Gregory Zilboorg on Literature, Leland Olds on American Social History, Frank Tannenbaum on Modern European History, and James P. Warbasse on the Cooperative Movement, Bulletin of the Rand School, 1919-20. See Appendix II.

17. The year after the Lusk Laws were repassed in 1921 marked the opening of Camp Tamiment. Evans Clark taught Political Science, William Soskin, Modern Theatre, Mary Austin, American Literature, Otto Beyer, Industrial Problems. Robert Ferrari lectured on Crime, Taraknath Das on the Far East. The roster of lecturers also included Clement Wood, Arthur W. Calhoun, George Soule, Joseph Jablonower, Norman Thomas, Solon DeLeon, Jessie W. Hughan and Stuart Chase. Bulletin of the Rand School, 1920-21. See Appendix II.

18. Toni Sender’s salary was partially paid by the AFL-CIO, an item regularly reported in its annual budget.

19. See Appendix II.

20. David Edison Bunting, Liberty and Learning. With an Introduction by Professor George S. Counts, President, American Federation of Teachers. (Washington, American Council on Public Affairs, 1942), p. 2.

21. Ibid., p. 1.

22. This committee was composed of Lillian D. Wald, of the Henry Street Settlement; Paul U. Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic; the Reverend John Haynes Holmes; Rabbi Stephen S. Wise; Florence Kelley, president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and head of the Consumers League of America; George W. Kirchwey; Crystal Eastman Benedict; L. Hollingsworth Wood, a prominent Quaker attorney; Louis P. Lochner, afterwards of The New York Times Bureau in Berlin; Alice Lewisohn: Max Eastman; Allen Benson and Elizabeth G. Evans. Ibid. See Appendix II.

23. Ibid., p. 10. See chart of political affiliations of national committee, American Civil Liberties Union.

24. Paul Blanshard was a contributor to the official 1928 Campaign Handbook of the Socialist Party, entitled The Intelligent Voter’s Guide and published by the Socialist National Campaign Committee. Other contributors were: W. E. Woodward, Norman Thomas, Freda Kirchwey, McAllister Coleman, James O’Neal, Harry Elmer Barnes, James H. Maurer, Lewis Gannett, Victor L. Berger, Harry W. Laidler and Louis Waldman. All were officials of the League for Industrial Democracy. See Appendix II.

34. San Francisco Examiner (August 11, 1963). “We underestimate,” writes Lerner, “how deeply most people need a rebel-victim symbol. There is a lot of free-flowing aggression in all of us, and one of the functions of a cause celebre is to give us a chance to channel some of it. . . . This brings us back to Ward as the rebel against society, and the victim of its power-groups.”

35. Signers of this letter were: Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation; Norman Thomas, leader of the Socialist Party; The Reverend John Nevin Sayre; Mary Heaton Vorse, contributor to The Nation and the friend and inspirer of Sinclair Lewis; Roger Baldwin, director of American Civil Liberties Union; The Reverend Percy Stickney Grant: The Reverend John Haynes Holmes; Paxton Hibben, director and solicitor of funds for the “Russian Red Cross” in the United States. All are listed by Mina Weisenberg as “cooperators” of the League for Industrial Democracy. See Appendix II.

36. In this connection, it is interesting to note that in June, 1919, the first issue of Freedom–a paper published by the Ferrer group of Anarchists at Stelton, New Jersey–stated editorially: “It may well be asked, ‘Why another paper?’ when the broadly libertarian and revolutionary movement is so ably represented by Socialist publications like the Revolutionary Age, Liberator, Rebel Worker, Workers’ World and many others, and the advanced liberal movement by The Dial, Nation, World Tomorrow and to a lesser degree, the New Republic and Survey. These publications are doing excellent work in their several ways, and with much of that work we find ourselves in hearty agreement.” (Author’s note: One of the founders of the Ferrer School, Leonard D. Abbott, was also a founder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He was associate editor of Freedom. Members of that short-lived paper’s editorial staff were teachers at the Rand School.)

37. The Reverend John Nevin Sayre was a founder of the ACLU and signed the appeal for funds in the Bridgman case.

38. Upton Sinclair, “The Fishpeddler and the Shoemaker,” Bulletin of International Social Studies (Summer, 1953).